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It helped me free myself from a longtime source of unhappiness.

Henry Chinaski is just so deplorable and lovable; he makes me laugh.

Love is the difference between a full life and an empty one.

This is kind of a big, wet valentine, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you throw it out?

Favorite character? What a question. It’s like choosing a favorite child.

I once heard in a sermon, “Choose the important over the urgent.”

I’m obsessed with finding a convertible that has enough room.

Love enlarges. What you put out into the world, you get back tenfold.

I usually get my best writing done at night or at the close of day.

Don’t write what you know. Write what you can imagine.

I’ve found that love has provided my life’s happiest moments.

A friend of my father’s once told me, “You’ll never be a writer.”

The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception.

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

I sometimes have to laugh because even now, as a middle-aged man.

Perhaps more than ever writers may have two kinds of fame.

I found it impossible not to imagine a radiant future for myself.

Poets need to be
in constant touch with the extremes of feeling.

That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process.

When he died earlier this year an enormous hole was left in my life.

The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition.

Grandfather advised me: learn a trade. I learned to sit at a desk.

There’s this cool magazine online. They let people read it for free.

The Interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never...

The Warsaw Pact invaded in 1968 and soon banned Hrabal’s work.

Our culture cherishes a fantasy of a certain writerly existence.

I was bold, even reckless, in what I wrote, and in how I wrote it.