The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word