Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.
If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don’t you feel a certain alienation?
Students who don’t want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.
Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.
There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we’d all been weaned too soon.
What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he’s thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you’re past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.
Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
Art is hard for a puritan to understand.
Can it be that action is active resignation? Something is trying to develop; it moves ever so slightly, and there comes your man of action and bashes in the hothouse windows.
Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.
If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle – absolute busyness – then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy – and without consciousness.
The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.
What makes books – and with them writers – so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
I am not faithful but I am attached.
After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and – above all – its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything – and everyone – is fair game.