Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.

Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.

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.

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.

The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.