Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole- so that all …

You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say, 'real experience is peren…

The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality

''Write what you know' is a tautology. You have no choice -- you have to write what you know, and in order to write something new, you have to learn something …