Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.