The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.