My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

All blessings are mixed blessings.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.