Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

Teaching, real teaching, is - or ought to be - a messy business.

I believe some people are just too damn smart to write fiction.

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.

Survival is triumph enough.

The writer's job is to get naked.

The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!

There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.

Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.