“Les rves sont seuls les ralits de la vie.”

“For the taking of revenge, a man locks himself up alone and thinks. His stomach must be empty for his head to be full. Vengeance comes a little from the heart and a lot from the mind; one must take...”

“Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.”

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”

“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”

“I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had so...”

“Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misint...”

“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”

“As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball playe...”

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meanin...”

“All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.”

“The way a book is read- which is to say,the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.”