I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.