I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

The divine art is the story.

But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.

I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.