“The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be. ”

“There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.”

“...I thought it was safer and easier to be one my own. But I don't think I was to be invisible anymore because-because it's lonely, and I don't want to be lonely. I don't want to be alone.”

“I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.”

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”

“Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.”