Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Anger makes people stupid.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.

Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

I don't just love her, she owns me. Completely. I'd do anything for her

To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.

One of the things that made Star Wars work was the kids didn't know who their dad was.

Men often marry in hasty recklessness and repent afterward all their lives.

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?

If you want to get on in life get off your arse because it ain't going to come to you. And if it does come to you and you're not off your arse then you ain't going to keep it very long.

Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day.