"[T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged g…"

"Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series …"

"Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the p…"

"[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the tr…"

"Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—a…"

"The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human…"

"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this withi…"

"Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the fo…"

"The truth is the light and light is the truth."

"All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn't that what…"