I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?