“I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reaso...”

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.”

“The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when its perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So its only absolutely perfe...”

“Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.”

“I've never listened to music lying down. Listening's reading if you close your eyes.Music's a wood you walk through.”

“Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.”

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want ...”

“I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.”

“Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to ...”

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

“You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --”

“If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”