In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.