“A year ago, I turned the final page of The Book of the Dead. I don't feel young any more.”

“"There are some dead who are more alive than the living."
"No, no! It would be more true to say that there are some who are more dead than the dead."
"Maybe. In any case there are old things which are still young."
"Then if they are still young we can find them for ourselves…. But I don't believe it. What has been good once never is good again."”

“Stories never really end… even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”

“All of a sudden I had to remember some words that Marlowe had told me over fifteen years ago: 'Dead men don't wear plaid.' Hmm… Dead men don't wear plaid. I still don't know what it means.”

“I don't know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don't know if the book I'm working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don't care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody. I feel that I'm lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change.”

“Persons whom I saw thirty years ago and with whom I was intimate now appear on the page, and this compels me to declare that The Story of the Stone is a book of the deepest feelings and the truest words. Unless, however, one has in fact experienced such events or been deluded by such feelings, reading it is like "chewing wax" absentmindedly, never understanding the miraculous wonders of what one has witnessed.”

“Persons whom I saw thirty years ago and with whom I was intimate now appear on the page, and this compels me to declare that The Story of the Stone is a book of the deepest feelings and the truest words. Unless, however, one has in fact experienced such events or been deluded by such feelings, reading it is like "chewing wax" absentmindedly, never understanding the miraculous wonders of what one has witnessed.”

“For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead… We're nothing more than dust jackets for books… so many pages to a person…”

“Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.”

“I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”