“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

“Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.”

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn...”

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”

“Viva my husband who was Mayor of this town”

“I would like to bear thy son and hy daughter," she told hime. "And how can the world be made better if there are no children of us who fight against the fascists?”