Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

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.

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

If he [the Artist] were to take up the pen it would be...to better express his individuality and explain it to others; or else to put his internal affairs in order...to deepen and sharpen his relationship with his fellow men because other souls exert an immense and creative influence on our soul; or to try to fight for a world as he would like it to be, for a world that is indispensable to his life.

Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.