Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

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 don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

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.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.