It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.

I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.

You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.

I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.

I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?

You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.