"An anguish of longing would boil up..." - Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.”

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”

“In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.”

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it .”

“[Polo Is My Life] is what's called a sex book - you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's about the manager of a sex theater who's forced to leave and flee to the mountains. He falls in love and gets in even more trouble than he was in the sex theater in San Francisco. Most of my stories are tales of anguish, stress and grief.”

“The very idea of an infinite in place would be a contradiction in terms, as a place must begin and continue in time.”

“All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.”

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”