Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

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

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.