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.

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

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

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.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

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.