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

My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. . . . It's about time for writers - particularly those who are genuine artists - to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.

What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!

If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.