A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.

When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder - that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. ... The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.

Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.

A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.

People's destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring—they're all alike, and they're all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you—you're one in a million. You're happy—

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.