“We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.”

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they’re going to know the truth when I do this book!

All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.

Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.

It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.

If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.

We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.

Nationality isn’t soul.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….