Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man’s traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that ‘other’ who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.
They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime.
Nostalgia is cowardice.
The essential difference between the culture of the past and the entertainment of today is that the products of the former sought to transcend mere present time, to endure, to stay alive for future generations, while the products of the latter are made to be consumed instantly and disappear, like cake or popcorn.
Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.
Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct – how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?
Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.
Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.
And yet, my dear Estela, in the end one accepts the will of God, resigns oneself, and discovers that, even with all its calvaries, life is full of beautiful things.
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying ‘higher culture’, because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.
When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.
Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning.
Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges’s pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.
The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.
It’s beautiful, as long as you concentrate on the landscape and the birds, because everything man-made there is ugly.
I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don’t.
One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.
A Criminal is the case of surplus of human energy directed in the wrong direction.
De fiecare data, imi aparea tot mai clar ca unicul lucru pe care doream sa-l fac in viata era sa devin scriitor si astfel mi se intarea convingerea ca singura cale pentru a reusi este aceea de a te darui, trup si suflet, numai literaturii.