Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

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

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

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.