William Kennedy quotes:

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.

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.

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

Anger makes people stupid.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

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.

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.