You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.