All saints have past and all sinners have a future.

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.

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.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!