Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.

There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize--it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.