If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.

Respectable people... What bastards!

Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.

There's only so far we can step backward in one day

It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.

In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.

I feel as if sometimes women can't deal with what's going on and they have no one around who actually understands.

~Before, my career came first. All I had to think about was myself. Now my children prevail. It doesn't mean my career is less important; I just have to position things differently.~

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque.

From the age of about five to twelve I was very bad, a hideous little terror who beat people up. I was a member of a Rough Gang - we went around and terrorised all the pupils in school.

Some feelings are stronger than fear: love, longing, desire.

A muse comes down from Mount Olympus and changes my attitude, cheering me up - it's an inner intuition, suddenly giving a breakthrough to be able to move ahead.