Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us [Americans] almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers."

"The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect."

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

"The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?"