That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

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

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.