WILLIAM KENNEDY

The great network of social insurance programs established by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, President Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, President John F. Kennedy’s Great Society, and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and defended by President Bill Clinton, sharply limits the amount of poverty a downturn [in the economy] can cause.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

Anger makes people stupid.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Anger makes people stupid.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.