Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything – reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
I don’t see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read.
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
Man’s principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
Books always speak of other books.
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
Naturally, everything depends on one’s background books and on what one is looking for.
Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said.
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.
And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
I don’t miss my youth. I’m glad I had one, but I wouldn’t like to start over.
I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.