It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

Write, write, write-till your fingers break.

I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

Man is what he believes.