“He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.”

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

“In the days when I didn't know people were reading and judging me, I wrote serenely, as if eating bliny; now I am afraid when I write.”

“Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.”

“This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!”

“If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.”

“there are things in life which one can confide in one person only, whom one trusts. It is because of this that I write to my mother without the knowl- edge of the others, for whom my secrets are quite uninteresting, or, rather, . unnecessary.”