“Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.”

“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations...”

“Literature is news that stays news.”

“When you start searching for pure elements in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant...”

“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.”