I am myself and I am here.

That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?

As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.

The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.

She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.

I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.