One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.