“Well I know Gyuri [the familiar diminutive of Georg or György], that human beings are unapproachable, that their souls are as far from each other as stars; only the remote radiance reaches to the other. I know that human beings are surrounded by dark, great seas, and thus they look across to one another, yearning but never reaching one another”

“I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.”

“No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”

“The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress.”

“...human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence to one another.”

“The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.”