“I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.”

“Writers don't get mad they get even in their novels.”

“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”

“I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.”

“Writers are made--forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities--over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same as the writer you become.”

“Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.”