The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
tso-life
Art is the triumph over chaos.
chaostso-art
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.
citiesplaces
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
familyplaces
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
griefpoetry
A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.
courtesyhistorywriters
Homesickness is nothing Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
homesickness
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
joypeoplerelationshipstso-love
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
abilitydangerliteraturepower
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
literature
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind
loneliness
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
naturewrongs
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
strengthtso-lifewisdom
readers-and-writers
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
booksfictioninspirationalon-fictionwriting