In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.