None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.

Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.