The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.

One of the many interesting challenges nature presents us is its apparent disinterest in maintaining the order humans crave.

The image-managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market.

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.