When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.