May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.

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

Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.

Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.