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.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening". . .The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

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.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.