Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.