From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.