Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.