Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

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

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.