“My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.”

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

I wouldn’t buy somebody’s album on a dare if they called him a musician’s musician. I don’t write to be a writer’s writer. I don’t want to be like the little-magazine writer.

Love and despair go hand in hand.

When you’re not involved, other people’s unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it’s you, it ceases to be a comedy.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.

I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

I found out about reviews early on. They’re mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That’s probably why I’m less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.

The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I’ve had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

Professional Southerners sicken me.

Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?

I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I’m glad I was disabused.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

Architecture is not so much a knowledge of form, but a form of knowledge.

I find that most of us actors can’t stand ourselves in any form.

I think dance in any culture, in any form, is a true leveler.

In other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

Writing is the thing that sustains me and keeps me going. It is a form of self-preservation for me.

A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

All forms of commerce are adversarial.