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

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

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.