Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.