The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.