People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.