There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

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

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

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.

... 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.