The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.