... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.