True power is given to the vulnerable.

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

True power is given to the vulnerable.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.