Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

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.

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.