It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves..

My hole is warm and full of light..

We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend o….

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me..

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind curren….

I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also….

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states . Why, if the….

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains..

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity..

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these d….

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have..

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I….

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they s….

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge..

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like f….

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficul….

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove..

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain..

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but des….

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas..

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affir….