To advise is not to compel.
If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter.
When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.
Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.
We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
If there’s a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two. If you fire a gun in act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act one, scene one.
Only one who loves can remember so well.
It is the writer’s business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.
I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.
Write, write, write-till your fingers break.
Three o’clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can’t sleep, I am so happy.
You ask me what life is. That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.
We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.
The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.
Brevity – the sister of talent.
Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.
Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.