What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Corrupt judicial practices in Russia, America, China, Great Britain, and other countries only vary by a single degree: the cost of services.

The only person that you should try to be better than, is nobody else but your old self.

Solitude is a temple for me.

I love awards, especially if I get them.

"Come at once," she had written to him. "Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never needed you before. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come at once"

If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you." Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.

Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.

My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939.

The silent majority, that's actually an invention of Richard Nixon's.