The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.

I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.