Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.

If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it.