That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.