Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.