Edgar Allen Poe really started me when I was 8. I fell in love with everything of his.
If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C’mon, it’s stupid.
It’s rare you get an idea from a dream. I can’t really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I’ve ever had a dream that held up. They’re much too dislocated.
There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Go out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, “Hey, we got a crazy man in the community,” and they’ll begin talking to you.
The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.
I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That’s immortality. That’s the only immortality I care about.
You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.
A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
But souls can’t be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.
A life’s work should be based on love.