All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.
When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Business only has two functions – innovation and marketing.
The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body’s surface of its terrible, basic importance.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today’s world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.