To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls

I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.

When we realize that words can destroy something good, wonderful, and dear, and that by keeping silent we can avoid causing the least damage or harm, it’s easy to stay silent.

At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.

Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.

I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

How uninteresting interesting things can become.

Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: something’s missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.

With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.

She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

Impatience is not the fastest way of getting to where your treasures are. It is the quickest way of by-passing them without even knowing. Keep calm

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

The maddened four men followed frantically, for it is better to be in the presence of the awful than only within hearing. ("The Black Dog")

She didn't pick her way over the terrain like she was afraid of slipping on the ice...She glided over it with long confident strides. Her hands were in her vest pockets. Her eyes were Susannah.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

When you do something with a lot of honesty, appetite and commitment, the input reflects the output.

The secret to creative freedom is letting go of our habitual certainities.

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

To be a character actor is to be open, to be a chameleon.