“While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.”

“So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.”

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”

“Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them where they don't want to go.”

“We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”

“I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.”