One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.