The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.