Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
The eye the point where a person’s identity is concentrated.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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.