But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.