There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.

It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.