For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.
That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.
The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
The surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.
In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don’t think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout – and the same is true of life.
The world needs a wash and a week’s rest.
I write because I love to play with language.
We cannot be deaf to the question: ‘Do I love this world so well that I have to know how it ends?
All time spent reading is time well-spent.
Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.
Here am I, Here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?
Just as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death.
There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crim consciously, for its own sake.
The wolves will get you if the moths won’t.
For love: a poet. For romance: a journalist.
If people marry on the assumption that love must always overcome obstacles, they will either become unfaithful or they will make things difficult. The better you know someone, the better you can torture him: man and wife become each other’s devils.
Any society is in danger of dismissing the virtue of another society because of its vices, and a democracy is always in danger of not paying enough attention to manners and forms.
In a tragic contradiction between the normal and the exceptional, there is suffering, in a comic contradiction, none.
It is time for the destruction of error.
If a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer ‘writer’ for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both.