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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

I had an essence in my life that I was nothing.

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.