I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.