“…I have discovered that plays are easier to write than novels if the writer has a certain verbal facility, a certain capacity for the colloquial, an ear for the secret cadences of the spoken word. A play can be written with more ease than a novel…”

“Many of the symbols, word-plays and secret patterns with which the novel abounds seem to be used out of sheer ebullience, as though the author was playing some sort of game with himself and did not much care whether he was observed or not. Chinese devotees of the novel often continue to read and reread it throughout their lives and to discover more of these little private jokes each time they read it.”

“I have huge respect for short stories—I just find them much harder to get right than a novel. A novel is a lot baggier and it gives you more leeway to go on for too long or to make mistakes. Whereas in a short story, every sentence, every word, matters—and that’s very hard. I think it’s easier to write too much than it is to write exactly the right thing.”

“Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart-or maybe we should say that work discovers you.”

“I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. … They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.”

“History has no more validity than a novel.”

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

“I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell.”