“I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough. ”

“There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition — well it wouldn’t, since shocks never console — or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so as much as with the fact that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even in its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays — even showboats and grandstands — to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers — in all of us — for justice, with the demand for the explicable reap/sow benefits (or punishments), with the law of just desserts — with all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.”

“Even the sky a hybrid — here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.”

“Because all books ARE the Book of Job -- man in the crucible like Jack in the Box....”

“I believe if I Piss God off one more time. I'll be eligible to win a free Bible”

“The more refined and intellectual our needs become, the less they are capable of satiety.”

“The more one knows of one's religion the less one believes - no one living knows more of mine than I.”