I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art.

Farewell my friends, I go to glory.

I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.