Revolutionaries make a crass and grievous error when they distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the masses, the nobility and the common people, the ruling and the ruled. The only distinction is between those who adapt and those who don’t; the rest is literature, and bad literature. The beggar, if he adapts, can become king tomorrow, though in doing so he’ll forfeit the virtue of being a beggar. He’ll have crossed the border, losing his nationality.

These thoughts console me in this cramped office, whose grimy windows overlook a joyless street. These thoughts console me, and for company I have my fellow creators of the world’s consciousness – the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp,..... and even, if the reference be permitted, Jesus Christ, who was nothing in the world, his very existence being doubted by history. Quite a different class of men is formed by the likes of the state councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the senator Victor Hugo, the chief of state Lenin, the chief of state Mussolini .....

Those of us in the shade, among the delivery boys and the barbers, constitute humanity .....

On the one hand there are the kings with their prestige, the emperors with their glory, the geniuses with their aura, the saints with their haloes, the leaders with their supremacy, the prostitutes, the prophets and the rich… On the other hand there’s us – the delivery boy on the corner, the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, the barber with his jokes, John Milton the schoolteacher, the shop assistant, Dante Alighieri the tramp, those whom death forgets or consecrates and whom life forgot without ever consecrating.