The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

Why are you sad, when you can sing a song?

She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.

We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few but we can't have both.

There are people who will appreciate what I've done, and there will be people who will criticize me. Ultimately history will have the final say.

Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly.

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.

I was kind of a bouncy kid. I used to roller-skate into the sides of cars.

The best advertising is done by satisfied customers.

Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.

Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.