A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
I don't like work. . . but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.
You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.
If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything.
It's going to be okay. Words that mean nothing. really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we're falling.
There is no one who is without faults, and who is not in some way a burden to others, whether he is a superior or a subject, an old man or a young one, a scholar or a dunce.
Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated.
I'm happy that I have my family, and I'm happy that I had Virginia, where I grew up, to retreat to any time I felt overwhelmed. Whenever there were times when I felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me and I was floating in this crazy space, I would stop and go back to that neighborhood and realize nothing's changed, really.