“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)”

“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)”

“...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.”

“I'm a California boy. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.(Paris Review Interview)”

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.”

“...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.”

“There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.”