What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.