You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing....
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going...
The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
I am the penny whistle of American literature.