However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.