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.
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.
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.
You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
When Satan’s not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn’t even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?
Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain – not falsification, but a shifting.
I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it’s especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as ‘do-gooders.’ This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.