We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. We are one flesh, but separated like stars.

Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle.

I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.

The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world.

There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our st idity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.