The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.

Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

I don't think in any language. I think in images.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.