You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can. Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they mean to say. ….

The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew..

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export..

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Fla….

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take ….

I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriti….

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't….

At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of la….

I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it..

I start early in the morning. I'm usually out in the woods with the dog as soon as it gets light; then I drink a whole lot of tea and start as early ….

It's all about letting the story take over..

Life is a means of extracting fiction..

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you..

One does not consider style, because style is..

The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So….

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, y….

I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writer….

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about..

The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake….

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful..

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely..