You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.

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

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.