But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.

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

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

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!

Always remember that your future is determined by what you do today, not tomorrow.

Love is like a magic trickYou know you are getting fooled, but still, you stand in lineAnd pay to see it again and again.

I have always had this mentality because I hated to break anything on the car.

I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.

I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past - a combination of both.

You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say.

Many wise words are spoken in jest, but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

You always get told how important the premiere and doing the press is, but I have suspicions.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.