When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.

Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.

The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it