“I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.”

“Even though I know my own name (barely), I still sometimes write my name wrong. Usually it only happens when I write in cursive and am endorsing checks for money I can’t recall earning.”

“As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.”

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.”

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”

“I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.”