The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine; the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots.

The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.