The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.

The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.

how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.