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.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.