Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
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.