The silence of a flower: a kind of silence which we continually evade, of which we find only the shadow in dreams.

The child and the poet know that Reality is what does not need to be realistic.

You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?

All you need are the words I give you here and your own honest efforts.

The more patient we are, the closer the Iranians get to a nuclear weapon.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

I am delighted to have had students, friends and colleagues in so many nations and to have learned so much of what I know from them. This Nobel Award honours them all.

There is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like.

It's hard for me to put on weight.

Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.