Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.