"We were having tea with my mother-in-law the other day and out of the blue she said, 'I've decided I want to be cremated.' I said, 'Alright, get your coat.'"

"I make all this shit up and people pay me. It's great, you know, thank you. All right so you guys put my kids through college and I scared the shit out of you while I was doing it. It's terrific. It's…"

"If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as yo…"

"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life."

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones."