I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.

Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

This fear is one of the horrors of an author's life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation? I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, 'How could you dare write that story, it's the most frightening work I have ever read.' I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.

When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?