«Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.»

«The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.»

«It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it.»

«Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.»

«Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.»

«Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.»

«I see a lilly on thy brow, / With anguish moist and fever dew; / And on thy cheek a fading rose / Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads / Full beautiful, a faery's child; / Her hair was long, her foot was light, / And her eyes were wild.»

«There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.»

«The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.»

«And that's how the book grew. That is, I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, But she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.»