Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.

I am glad that I do not have any children.

Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?

Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?

We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

Things are not as we would like them to be. There is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself.

How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

How can one know anything at all about people?

Children usually do not blame themselves for getting lost.

What I have always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It is probably nothing more than the affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and their good opinion of me.

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.

Create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.

If I have a stupid day, everything looks wrong to me.

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.

We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work.

Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself.

My different personalities leave me in peace now.

Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours.

Everyone here says in a surprised manner that I have grown... they are so stupid and do not notice that I am standing up straighter!

I am no longer afraid to say anything.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned, hence something given truly as a present.

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that life.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.