When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment! Oh, self-satisfied people: with what proud self-satisfaction such babblers are ready to utter their pronouncements! If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn't have the heart to teach me.

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.

That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.