To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

I didn't think; I experimented.

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition