I used to be a bumper sticker kind of writer. Now I’m more developed, and my writing often takes up whole bumpers. 


There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

My new book is going well. It’s practically writing itself! Actually, what I mean is I’m not writing it, my clone is.

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

I hope you enjoy reading my book as much as I didn’t enjoy writing it. Just kidding! I hope you don’t enjoy it at all.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.