One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.