If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me.

I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.

It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.

What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?

You should not want to know the things in people's minds. If you were meant to hear them, they would be said.

Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.

[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.