“Hard and cruel though it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. If you tell them -- you compassionate and accommodating human readers -- that they may bring their distress and anguish before any other authority, you will be cruelly deceiving and mocking them. For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: 'Who am I?”

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

“It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.”

“Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?"Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.”

“I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.”

“Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture”

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”

“Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.”

“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”

“Come now and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they gave got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann.”

“Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother.”