Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.

The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.