It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

Joy and sadness come by turns.

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.