Brevity - the sister of talent.

We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.

Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough.

A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.

Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.

To advise is not to compel.