Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.

I remember things the way they should have been.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travellin' through the pastures of the sky