“One’s life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d’you know, it’s most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.”

Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

I used the word ‘prose’ in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

It seemed to me that I was coming out of a suffocating nightmare and that the low clouds flying before the wind were the shreds of an evil dream.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.

You think you’ve made something really great, but there’s a reason why it’s not resonating the way some previous work did. But it’s not that easy to just replicate.

One thing is that life’s great moments evolve from simple acts of cooperation with God’s mysterious promptings-nudges that always lean toward finding what’s been lost and freeing what’s been enslaved .

The idea of a future without her wasn’t to be borne. She had by some mysterious metamorphosis become more beautiful than anyone else he had ever encountered.

Acting is a mysterious process.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect; as darkness is, in comparison with light–so is mystery, in comparison with knowledge.

It’s impressive when you’re such a mysterious fictional character that even avid enthusiasts are debating your existence within the mythos.

To imagine that “God moves in mysterious ways” is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.