The Queen's Pride was his ship, and he loved her. (That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today and I love you. My cold is better and I love you. Say hello to Horse and I love you. Like that.)

All novels are experimental.

The truth is, we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult, the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery-a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.

In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

Some things can only be said in fiction, but that doesn't mean they aren't true.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common-a need to create an alternative world.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.