Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?