A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

• A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
• To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
• Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
• Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
• A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
• Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
• A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
• Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
• My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
• It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.