I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter how difficult it would have been--made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have--yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!

I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.

Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter how difficult it would have been--made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have--yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!

Our element is unending immaturity.

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.