“If one wants to lead a good life, A HUMAN LIFE, one must work.”

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”

“..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.”

“It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.”

“I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.”

“This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.”

“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.”