Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

All literary men are Red Sox fans -- to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss -- you can't do it alone.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.

My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil -- not the strength to choose between the two.

Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife.

For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.