Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.
The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.
We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians – it’s an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.
Failure too is a form of death...
People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.
There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.
It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.
He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that is where we really belong.
I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect – it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.
Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods.
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed – that is the meaning of evolution.
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.
At one with the One, it didn’t mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.
I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.