One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find the causes is implanted in man's soul.

If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it.