Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.