It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

Monseigneur, I have killed you! You are dead! You are dead!"You display an unseemly joy, " he remarked. "I had no notion you were so bloodthirsty.

Sometimes people have been stepping so long, they have forgotten what it's like to be stepped on.

Writing is an incurable psychological disease which only gets worse with writing.

Another night, I dreamed I saw my father sweeping out the barn floor clean, and would not suffer the wheat to be brought in the barn. He appeared to me to be in anger.

I don't want to hear music, I don't want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? I pity you. I thought you cleverer; for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it.

I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

Honestly, I don't want to worry about the trivial feelings here. I have nothing and I still have a far way to go. There's no time for me to hesitate. The people around me force me to hesitate.

I was frequently told at drama school that I was thinking too much.

In the Church, when we talk about 'the world', we often create an us and them situation and end up planting the seeds of all that we feel wrong with the world in the soil of our own backyard.