Nationalism is the love which ties me to the blockheads of my country, to the insultors of my way of life, and to the desecrators of my language.

A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.

To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.