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

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

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.