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" John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?' "

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" The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom. "

" True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. "

" The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce. "

" If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it. "

" Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. "

" In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. "

" The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes. "

" Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently. "

" The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.' "

" To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. "

" Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice. "

" I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors. "

" We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. "

" Education is for growth and fulfillment. "

" The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies. "

" Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels. "

" One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires. "

" If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering. "

" I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic. "

" Writing is the hardest physical work there is. "

" To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being. "

To Be Or Not To Be

" I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me. "

" At the typewriter you find out who you are. "

" I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know. "

" The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being. "

" My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy. "

" A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans. "

" The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas. "

" What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy. "

" If little else, the brain is an educational toy. "