Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

The pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

I’m skeptical that the novel will be ‚re-invented.‘

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

Because the sweeter the cake, the more bitter the jelly can be.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.