One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one’s passional changes.
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.
Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.
America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you – no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.
If a woman’s got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it’s thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!
The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.
Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see – everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.
The goal is to know how not-to-know.
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.
For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.