"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

"The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early."

"It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Jazz is the music of the body"

"He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie."

"What I cannot love, I overlook"

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection"

"Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her."

"Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."

"Good things happen to those who hustle."

"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

"My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living."

"There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person."

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

"If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."

"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Dreams are necessary to life."

"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."

"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy."

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."

"The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless."

"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat."

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. Albert Einstein It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

"If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation."

"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."

"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."

"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."

"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."

"She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not care to be herself."