Our salvation never comes in the form we would have chosen.

Sometimes, in that darkness, there is a single act of love, some selfless gesture, an aspiration, and we see that it's not been all waste, all hopeless, and we can ... well ... go on.

Uninvited criticism is insult.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery.

Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.

Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the influence of alcohol.

Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.

Using language like jungle growth isn't the solution to telling a story.

There's something about a parenthesis in fiction that puts one off, saying, "It's me, moi, jumping in now."

What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.

Hatred gives you nothing, takes nothing from you, but destroys everything you have! Be careful of ideas of hatred that comes into your head. Destroy them before they make nests in your mind!

It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.

Style, I've got no style.

New Year's Eve always terrifies me.

Laugh not too much; the witty man laughs least: For wit is news only to ignorance. Lesse at thine own things laugh; lest in the jest Thy person share, and the conceit advance.

Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.

Gone were my girlish ideas about romantic love and my later ideas about sexual love. From Yi, I learned to appreciate deep-heart love. Peony in Love

As regards my feelings about drummers - there's Buddy Rich, and then there's everybody else.

God is always God, but the views which people and nations may take of him vary. No higher view is known than that of love.

Love is wiser than wisdom.