To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.

Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.