Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture.