I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Nothing is critic-proof.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

Style is character.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.