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.

I've got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I'm in it till the end of the race.

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived

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

Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.