The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.

The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.

Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.

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.

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.