“[We should] refrain from reading such notions as “fictive”, “fabricated”, and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic”. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence…into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life […] Without realising it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”