Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.

Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.

Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.

I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can't remember committing, a judicial error probably.

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.