nobody ever dies of an indignity.

... 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.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.