The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.

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

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

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

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

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?

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

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

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

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