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.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion.

In a way, I was safe writing

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.