“I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me - they must be unstable. Though it does have it’s poetry, I’ll allow that. When an old dwelling starts looking desolate, a mixture of regret and anxiety comes over us and we feel like we are leaving a safe harbor for the rolling sea. As for the new place, it looks on us with alien eyes, it has nothing to say to us, it is cold.”

“I’ve supped on potatoes and groats and am waiting to be sick. How about you?I supped like the Lord in Heaven.’and what does the Lord in Heaven have for supper?’Nothing.”

“The Kammerlicht: Explanations of the Impressions Left Upon Various and Sundry Natures by Dreams as Interpreted According to Tribe, and of the Numbers to be Staked in Lotteries in Conformity with the Meanings of Said Dreams .. says … there are eight ‘tribes’ of dreams and of the eight only the fifth is genuine. Tribe 8 are dreams emanating directly from evil spirits. Tribe 7 are dreams granted to the virtuous as direct revelations. Tribe 6 are dreams from roots planted in disease (fever and such). Tribe 5 are dreams that come to those who have taken no food before retiring and are of a healthy & tranquil disposition.”

“No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.”

“I'm not sure I would put it that way. When we get over something, we move on, we put it behind us. Do we leave the dead behind or do we take them with us? I think we take them with us. They accompany us. They remain with us, if in another form. We have to learn to live with them and their deaths.....I think of them every day, I wonder what they would say at a given moment. I ask them for advice, even today, at my age, when it will soon be time to be thinking of my own death"...”

“The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs. One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig, he was a chief commissioner of police.”

“I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.”