My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.