Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

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.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.