The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.