 All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. |
| I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. |
| Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated. |
| He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. |
| I find myself fascinating. |
| Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. |
| A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. |
| The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. |
| Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. |
| No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. |
| No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches. |
| The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness. |
| Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. |
| Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud. |
| Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. |
| Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. |
| There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos. |
| True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. |
| Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. |
| Happiness is the longing for repetition. |
