A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.