“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

I’m thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.

In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.