“How can you write if you can't cry?”

“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”

“The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.”

“The only real happiness a ballplayer has is when he is playing a ball game and accomplishes something he didn't think he could do.”

“He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.”

“I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”

“Future warns us through current symptoms in nature.”

“Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with ...”

“But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self tha...”

“The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.”

“They thought they were so different, Flame and Ice. Enemies always do. The Soviets and the West, they were the same. They looked at each other and saw monsters; they looked at themselves and saw me...”

“Lovers are food for each other to sustain their lives”

“Each thinking mind is a political mind”

“I am trying to ignore each of my thoughts and each of my stories and books... if I read them... they never sound well, but still we shouldn't go like...to do everything perfect and all perfect...”