Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.