Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

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.

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

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.