I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

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

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

The current medical records system is this: Room after room after room in a hospital filled with paper files.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth.

The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

How was I gonna get an education, sitting right back of Bobby Ann Mason?

There are some actors who are my contemporaries who I think of as purebreds and I'm not.