Every time I travel, I'm in a rage until I reach my destination. I find myself shouting at suitcases, as if it's their fault that I'm an inefficient packer. I've also learnt that whenever you despair of humanity and start thinking that you hate people - as I frequently do - you only have to travel to realise that people are basically all right.

I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times, I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success; at others, I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.

From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.

I have often been downcast but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary, I treat all the privations as amusing.

In my early days in school, I had no shoes, no school bags. There were days I had only one meal... I walked miles and crossed rivers to school every day. Didn't have power, didn't have generators, studied with lanterns, but I never despaired.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair, there is no hope.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.

Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, 'Casino Royale' dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.

You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's fine. That's not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It's a sign that it's normal; it's on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It's a journey of discovery - there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.