I hope that famous critics will not class me with certain devotees of death and doom if I say here that I think that funerals in our churchyard gave … - Halldór Laxness

Was all human endeavor then, even the beautiful of the world, of so little consequence compared with murder?

To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies. In the land where I belong, but which I shall never reach, individuals have no cares, and that is because industry runs by itself without anyone trying to steal from others. My land is a land of plenty; it is the world that Nature has given to mankind, where society is not a thieves' society, where the children aren't sickly but healthy and contented, and young men and women can fulfill their aspirations because it is natural to do so. In my world it is possible to fulfill all aspirations, and therefore all aspirations are in themselves good, quite unlike here, where people's aspirations are called wicked because it isn't possible to fulfill them.

It's strange that all birds don't fly in the same way . . . I've heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own . . . All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.