In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found.
The smallest coffins are the heaviest.
Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral.
A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.
To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare. That’s rare and valuable.
Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.
I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
People fall in love, but have to climb out.
A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.
Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you’ve seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That’s good practice, but it isn’t creative writing.
One battle doesn’t make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.
Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?
Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.
In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.
The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.
The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.
Optimism can keep a fool from accepting failure.
In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.
A big lie is more plausible than truth.