First, a gorgeous breakfast: just everything you can imagine from flapjacks and fried squirrel to hominy grits and honey in the comb...we're so impatient to get at the presents we can't eat a mouthful.

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

Some prisons don't allow guitar because the strings can be detached and used as weapons.