“Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.”

“Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.”

“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”

“When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”

“There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.”

“We just sat there on the sofa and looked at each other, a kind of unspoken mutual understanding filling the silence.”