I’ve found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it’s only a heap of rotting leaves.
To be good or bad doesn’t count: life out in this world doesn’t depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You’ll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.
Life is such an effort, Child. It’s a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.
No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it’s always the strongest, the cruellest, the least generous who win.
Listening to someone talk isn’t at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.
How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It’s like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did? He committed suicide!
I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all.
I know ours is a world made by men for men, their dictatorship is so ancient it even extends to language.
But here’s what I’ve learned in this war, in this country, in this city: to love the miracle of having been born.
Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn’t vote because I have dignity. If I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my own face.
Journalism combines adventure with culture.
With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination.
To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.
Arafat contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is.
I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.
I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.
Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven’t I the right to paint you as I want?
I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.
You cannot survive if you do not know the past.
I didn’t want to kill a man. I’m not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant.