As you get older, you don’t get wiser. You get irritable.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.
I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
Parents should leave books lying around marked ‘forbidden’ if they want their children to read.
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Laughter is by definition healthy.
What matters most is that we learn from living.
I write because I’ve always written, can’t stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.