The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

Great art can only be created out of love.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be