If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.

The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.