I am a cigarette with a body attached to it.
That morning she pours Teacher’s over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.
Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window – maybe rearrange all the furniture.
A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.
Art doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.
I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation.
Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it’d really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.
In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.
Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn’t hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
You have to have been in love to write poetry.
I’m moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.
A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore.
I’ve done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.
I’m always learning something. Learning never ends.
I am too nervous to eat pie.
Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.
It’s strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.