If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.