I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

All beginnings are hard.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul

While amidst the crowd and seeking quieteness in another zone you can still get away from them by homing in on matters within.

Sometimes I feel like we are the same, but sometimes, like right now, I feel the separation between our personalities like I've just run into a wall.

There are the relationships you make. All of the friends I made in grad school are the closest ones that I have.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

Hope changes everything, doesn't it?

Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

Seek to learn constantly while you live; do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.

Music has no race. It appeals to everybody.

Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism.