They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile… a stain upon the silence.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.