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

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.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.

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

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

The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.