The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love.

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

I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

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

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?