If a writer’s past is ugly, his biographer will invent a thousand anecdotes to cover it up.

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  It would be better for you, young man, not to write. Writing is what brought you to jail. Had you been illiterate, you might today be a decent, honest man and perhaps a respected citizen, but as it is you drag yourself from jail to jail like a gambler.

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  First you torment yourself until you write it, then you torment the editor to print it… then the public prosecutor to charge you and, finally, the judge to sentence you.

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  I truly do not know whether the crawling with which man begins his first movement in life is not a kind of training for practical life.

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  Although death is the one and most certain fact in every man’s life, everyone writing an autobiography usually avoids beginning with that fact.

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  From school into the army, from the army into prison, and from prison into marriage.

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  I ended my autobiography with my marriage, finding that after marriage a man has no autobiography.

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