“Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.”

“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”

“If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.”

“The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.”

“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

“We don't know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.”

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”