"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich - simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

"Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs. "

"A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

"I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski (is there anything more perfect than The Ethernal Husband?). Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in van Gogh's letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of individual over art."

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul."