Quotes

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.

The longest way round is the shortest way home.

Capitalism is unequally distributed wealth, and socialism is equally distributed poverty. But the saying is not quite right, for Bolshevism distributes even poverty unequally.

Everyone has the right to say what he thinks, but there is no law that forces anyone to listen.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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