Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.