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.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.