Quote collection
31 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can. Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they mean to say. The worst purpose of dialogue is to elicit information: "You know why we're out on this space station, Carruthers - to save the universe!""
"I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist."
"The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful."
"The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings."
"I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it."
"At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on."
"It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid."
"It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it"
"I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism."
"What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export."
"The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you."