Life comes first, an art not rooted in human experience is not worth a damn, but different kinds of minds have different kinds of experience, and all I ask of any man is validity; and there should be place for every type and kind of mind.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.

The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.

I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had - stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done.