I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it - write well.

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!

The ordeal is part of the commitment"Esquire Interview 10/10

Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

Each book starts from ashes.