The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.