Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lay down with a woman who's got more troubles than you. - Nelson Algren

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that geographically he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer. The thing is that here you get to be a writer differently. I mean, a writer like Sartre decides, like any professional man, when he's fifteen, sixteen years old, that instead of being a doctor he's going to be a writer. And he absorbs the French tradition and proceeds from there. Well, here you get to be a writer when there's absolutely nothing else you can do. I mean, I don't know of any writers here who just started out to be writers, and then became writers. They just happen to fall into it.

A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much.

I always think of writing as a physical thing. I'm not trying to generalize, it just happens to be that way with me.