Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

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

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

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

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.