The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.