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

As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

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

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

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.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.