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

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

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

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.