Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.
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?