What has happened makes the world. Live on the edge, looking.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'

I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home.

The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.

I heard words and words full of holes aching.

I will go to the garden. I will be a romantic. I will sell myself in hell, in heaven also I will be.

For love - I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

Communication is mutual feeling with someone, not a didactic process of information.

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere

Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies.

I don't give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it is hell.

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.

Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble.

In Chicago, integrated neighborhoods do not stay integrated for long.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.

We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.

I am a sect by myself, as far as I know.

Don't make excuses - make improvements!