I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables - piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes . . . long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness. . . .

The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language.