"Vegetarianism is my religion. I became a consistent vegetarian some twenty-three years ago. Before that, I would try over and over again. But it was sporadic. Finally, in the mid-1960s, I made up my mind. And I've been a vegetarian ever since. When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. … This is my protest against the conduct of the world. To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Nuclear power, starvation, cruelty — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one."

"If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments."

"We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children."

"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."

"Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions."

"Even in love, people betray themselves. And when you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself. I would say a great part of human history is a history of self-betrayal and betrayal of others."

"A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know."

"And is there no war on today? It is the weapons that have changed, that's all. Instead of an axe or scythe or scimitar, they fight with roubles."

"Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient."

"Money really is a great power, only one must know how to use it."

"Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything."

"Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...]."

"For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others."

"Your true Pole starts to sweat at the second decimal place, at the fifth he runs a temperature, and at the seventh has a stroke..."

"‘There are two men in me,’ he thought, ‘one quite sensible, the other a lunatic. But I am not concerned with that any longer... What shall I do, though, if the sensible man wins?’"

"In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all..."

"There are neither graves nor death in Nature; there are various forms of existence, some of which enable us to be chemists, others only chemical substances."