There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.