It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.

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

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.