Den eneste abnormitet er manglende evne til at elske.
Forfatterens rolle er ikke at sige, hvad vi alle kan sige, men det, som vi ikke kan sige.
Dreams are necessary to life.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Good things happen to those who hustle.
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibition, instabilities and it always balances them.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.