“Writing has to support itself.”

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

My fans mean more to me than they will ever know. I call these people my friends and my confidence and if they are here to see me and they are here to support me, then that’s all I need in life.

Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

In the end, that’s what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.

Sometimes if you just take the time to really pay attention and break it down, you can figure out what caused it. And from there, generally, I can pull myself up out of it. And if I can’t, that’s where the support group comes in.

Being at a club that supported me meant a lot.

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

What if we are all here to complement one another. – Kind.