Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.

I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.

After each creative act one has to be sustained by one's strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don't know what, lest one tumble.

If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.

I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.