Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.