When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.
The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.
We’re a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that’s all. You can’t change history. History is happening to us now.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
You can’t fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.
Don’t put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.
What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?
We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.
I guess everybody who isn’t dead yet is a survivor.
Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.
I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.
It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.
You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
The only way to get anything out of a writer’s brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.
A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.
Those who live by electronics die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.