It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

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.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. 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. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

I do not see the world at all; I invent it.

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.