The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.
Yes, it’s a well-known fact about you: you’re like death, you take everything.
But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
Yes, it’s crazy. Love is either crazy or it’s nothing at all.
I have to lie, if I don’t want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.