A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.