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.

245

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.

236

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.

181

One doesn't consider style, because style is.

161

I thought a lot about my attitude toward the world, toward fear and violence, and that I had something to say about these things. If you had asked me then what I was writing about, I would have said, in a kind of Kerouac-like romantic vein, 'America.'

158

It's all about letting the story take over.

155

A surprising number of respectable people, which includes the press corps, diplomats, civil servants, and the military, too, were involved, to some degree or other, in both drugs and gold.

140

I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner.

132

One is improvising when one writes, and you pick up in the same way a musician starts to improvise and detect the inner structure of what he's playing - that's the way it works in the writing of a novel. You pick up the beat.

119