It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.

You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through.

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

Music has a great advantage: without mentioning anything, it can say everything.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man’s breadth, with his heart.

There is no progress in art.

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.