So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

Reality favors symmetry.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.