What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

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

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

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