There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

We buy balloons, we let them go.

I have to return some videotapes

The better you look, the more you see.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

No one ever likes the right person.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

Why was I holding on to something that would never be mine? But isn't that what people do?

But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.

I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.

And as the elevator descents, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even father down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst

The truly important people in our lives are always in our future.

The world is a merrier place to live if people do things more out of sincerity, not just out of formality.

Those who enjoy the emotion of hating are much like the groups who sate their thirst for blood by hunting and hounding to death helpless animals as an outlet for their emotions.

The curse of the intelligent man is that he will always find himself surrounded by the ignorant. The measure of the intelligent man is determined by his tolerance toward them.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.

That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.

... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

We never understood the concept of people going onstage and giving anything less than 100 percent. Maybe that's a blue-collar work ethic, but I call it just ethics.

Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.