If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.

We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.

Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.