If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

There's always been, in my stories, something more abrasive and just harder on the characters, holding them at a distance and making fun of them, making their mistakes and their obsessions comical in one aspect. But I think the joke that I'm after when I do that is really on me.

Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow.

If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.

You construct characters and set them going in their own interior landscape, and what they find to talk about and what confronts them are, of course, things that concern you most.

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.

I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life.

I've always remembered. This fellow said to me - if you think someones'doing you wrong, it's not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging.

On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed—you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

I could probably have gotten six books out of my three if I’d wanted to do smaller themes. Twice as many books and they would have been half as good. Six so-so books. I don’t need that. I like big novels; I really admire the grand slam.