And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.

...'To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh.'– Ecclesiastes 12:12

What you truly own, is what you have inside you. Everything else can be destroyed, robbed or wasted.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Action is character.

The only real security for social well-being is the free exercise of men's minds.

We don't experience light, color, and gesture in a vacuum. We experience it in contexts.

It's important in any project to remain focused.

I think the word rich is all relative.

What's the point of living if you don't belong anywhere?

Love is the essence of a full and wonderful life.