If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."