Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.