I really spend as long as I can sketching everything out and working on the structure before I sit down to type out scenes.
I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore.
No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.
Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.
I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper correspondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.
Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.
You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
I've definitely had ideas and plans that sometimes exceed my means and capabilities.
Being on the path means we again meditate with joy. We deal with the suffering of life and the pain of existence without perfect enlightenment with a smile.
I feel like im in this river just getting swept along. . . And if I hold on to anyone, if I'm holding on for dear life, I'm not getting anywhere. I'm stuck. . . . I never wanted to get stuck
That's what this country needs -- more books!