We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.) — Donald Barthelme

When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.

There’s always the tension between losing an audience and doing the odd things you might want to try. The effort is always to make what you write nourishing or useful to readers. You do cut out some readers by idiosyncrasies of form. I regret this.

One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.