Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.

You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.

A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

It is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated.