I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
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.
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
