The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.