If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.