The fact is I don't lead a simple enough inner life. I indulge in excesses, bacchanalia of the spirit. Perhaps I identify too much with everything I read and study. Someone like Dostoevsky still shatters me.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

Life is good, after all...and that's what stays with me, even now, even when I'm about to be packed off to Poland.

If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.