"what I have written—and how I came to write it—is most powerfully what I am."

"out in what I knew damn well was the real world—of literature and everything else—my agony was how to begin. (How do …"

"I think such middle-class backgrounds, where the bourgeois only sniffs at art or intellect, often produce artists. A …"

"I don’t think artists can compete—except as to money and prizes, and, of course, status. Which may be temporary. But …"

"I couldn’t write those first stories about them until they were all dead. That’s when I began. (It was an unusual fam…"

"As for complication—or complexity—it excites me."

"(You graduated when you were seventeen, and shortly left the household to work and live on your own. Yet you weren’t …"

"I know by now that I don’t care to be an accepted habitué of any one world. That’s part of being a writer too. Wantin…"

"That’s the wonder of the English language. That its words can alternate between rough and soft, harsh and sweet. And,…"

"A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose."