Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.