If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

cleverness is a disease.

People don't know the consolations of being unsuccessful ... If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

Every time a child, any child, is born, it is new - and different; that is the wonder.

In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still ... In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights, but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.