Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.