Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.