Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.

Love is a scandal of the personal sort.

Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.

If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.