In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls