“A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.”

“In violence we forget who we are.”

“Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.”

“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”

“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."(on Lillian Hellman)”

“I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.”

“You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.”