My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.

I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.

I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer.

Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.

My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.

That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.

A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

School is a foretaste of life.

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

Being gifted needs courage.

Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school.

When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.

I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.

I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values.

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.

I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour.

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year.

I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.

My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.

It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother.

The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.

I came into the world two months too soon, I was in such a hurry.

I was not afraid of what I did not like. To overcome dislike of a thing often satisfied one's feeling of honour.

The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster.

I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light.

The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.

On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not.

It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.