“The creative writer is compulsively concrete—that is, he is bound to the things of experience. However strongly he holds his ideas, he cannot express them in the way a philosopher or a social scientist does. He does not deal in concepts, in formulated patterns of thought, but in iconic ways, in the way of images and imitations; he is concerned with people, places, actions, feelings, sensations. His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the window after dark, not fill the rooms.”

“The prayer of anyone hoping to make himself into a writer should be ‘Lord let me grow into such a man as has something to say! Let me be one of those that Henry James speaks of, one of those upon whom nothing is lost. Let understanding and wisdom be engraved on my mind as deep as the lines of living on a wise and weathered face. Teach me to love and teach me to be humble and let me learn to respect human differences, human privacy, human dignity, human pain. And then let me find the words to say it so it can’t be overlooked and can’t be forgotten.’”