This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

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.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.