After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

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

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

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.