Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies,as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect,but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.