Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.