... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

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

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.