Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

It is not restful, it is not possible to talk wholeheartedly to more than one person at a time. You can't really talk with a person unless you surrender to them, for the moment (all other talk is futile). You can't surrender to more than one person a moment.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

Certain springs are tapped only when you're alone.

Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.