At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

No dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.

It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.

Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.