He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.

Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.