The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps – his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.