The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.

Ford's last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with you own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.

[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.