"

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

"

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

"

How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wa...more

"

Business or profession?''I guess you'd call me a writer.'No profession,' said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like ...more

"

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

"

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunsh...more

"

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

"

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in t...more

"

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your b...more

"

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

"

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

"

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited o...more

"

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

"

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

"

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don't. Th...more