A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.

The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.

It is hardship that makes clear who the "fighters" are.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.