A favorite means of escaping the solution to any problem is to declare it too complex for solution. This absolves us from attempting solution. ... Any problem is too complex to solve when we do not wish to accept the conditions of solution. Solution is possible where acceptance is ready.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life.

When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.

At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them.

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.

It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.