Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.

[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory