It’s hard to tell whether the ship or airplane – they’re all the same, I’m convinced – is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I didn’t know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I’m not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

It’s hard to tell whether the ship or airplane – they’re all the same, I’m convinced – is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that’s where I commented someplace on hearing.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Really, I didn’t like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

I’m only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

I didn’t for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.

In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.

My father’s parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.