“Books are a narcotic.”

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

Paths are made by walking

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Please — consider me a dream.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

You only need to change your direction, said the cat, and ate it up.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet I have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes. I mean the universe, but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written.

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

I’ve never read one book about my father.

That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.

The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private revelation.