“The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.”

“Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.”

“Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”

“Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.”

“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.”

“And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.”

“[I]n adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship. But stories are vital. Stories never fail us, because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. [Contemporary writers, however,] take up their stories as with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.”