“The world is certainty a sudden place.”

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.

This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings.

The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.

I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.

The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.

Any guy who can maintain a positive attitude without much playing time certainly earns my respect.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn’t say the ones at my school were less capable. They could’ve been there.