Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Dignity is an anachronism.