I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.