Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.