All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.
It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.
I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed. " ". . . Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here. " "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.
I was totally romanticizing the idea of Los Angeles when the Doors, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young were hanging out there.
People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.