“Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.”

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

I have the impression that if he didn’t complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.

At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.