Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.