“I am a person always full of contradictions… It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.”

My pen is alight and my body aflame. Until both burn down to ash, my love and my hate will remain here in the world.

I’ve lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can’t change it even if you kill me.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country’s misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

Loving truth and living honestly is my attitude to life. Be true to yourself and be true to others, thus you can be the judge of your behavior.

I have spent myself on all kinds of things … I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.

A mess of beautiful contradictions make her whole, she wears fire for skin but a storm lives in her soul.

If you’re that obsessed with someone, why would you kill her? Humans are full of contradictions.

Perhaps the most valuable thing he taught me (his father) was that there is no contradiction between devotion to work and enjoyment of life and people

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers.