So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever known, if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadow passes over your hands and over all that you do.  You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples - those myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses.  Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses, only waiting to see us, once beautiful and brave.  Perhaps everything terrible in our lives is, in its deepest being, something helpless, that wants help from us.

You life will find its own paths... and that they be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

Everything is gestation and then birthing.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; not because I had forgotten it - on the contrary: it is the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognize you in it as if you were very near.

Things aren't so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.