Don’t let anybody ever tell you life’s fair. Not as long as I’m in it.

The less you carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will experience.

Life is not a chain of events but an area-something spreading out from a hidden centre and welling at once toward all points of the compass.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

College is the only place where you can rebel by doing exactly what people in authority tell you to do.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

You need to call on your best and strongest self.

I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.

You don't have to be perfect, but you have to try hard. And I did all the time.

I was at a bar nursing a beer. My nipple was getting quite soggy.

I'm a gentleman, if nothing else. It's taken me years to become one, but finally I have a sense of propriety.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. "Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

I felt that that experience, because of the responsible nature that I found I acted all during that traumatic time, that I felt that I was a man.

The humanitarian argument is so selective I find it difficult to swallow. It's not even so much about the choice as to where we should get involved and where we shouldn't.

Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.