Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is: what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problems of the modern novel is: what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!