If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.