The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.

Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.

It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.