The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

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.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

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.