words can never get at the truth.

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

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.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.