“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”

Interview with Don Swaim (1986)
Interview with Don Swaim (1986)

Variant: A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Source: Dear John

(29 January 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005
Context: At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right. There are only finer and lesser degrees of refinement, and even those are probably subjective. You might think it's perfect for a time, but read it a year or five years later, and you'll see you were mistaken. There's always something I can make better, every time I read one of my stories. Usually there are dozens of somethings. And I once thought this wasn't true, that a story reached a certain point and beyond that point you were only changing things, making them different, not making them better. Indeed, I thought, beyond a point, you risk screwing it all up. I don't think that anymore. You risk screwing it all up right from the start, and no story is ever as perfect as it can be. Perfection is always one or two polishes away from the writer.

King's Highway
Lyrics, Into The Great Wide Open (1991)