I once tried thinking for an entire day, but I found it less valuable than one moment of study.
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
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.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports. . . . When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.
I don't care what anybody says. The first tournament is not the hardest one to win. It's always the second one.
They say I'm a natural, I have natural charisma. People say that. I don't know.
I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware. . . Beware. . .