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The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

'The Author' is a play about responsibility, how active we are as spectators and how responsible we are for what we choose to look at.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.