“You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.”

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”

“But what was making her unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had wrecked her life?She raised her head and looked around, as though trying to find the cause of her suffering.”