“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”
“Optimism is the opium of the people.”
“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”
“The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.”
“Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.”
“Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.”
“Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.”
“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”
“Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.”
“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”
“Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”
“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”
“Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.”
“No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”
“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
“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.”
“A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
“The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”
“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”
“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.”
“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, antipathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”
“Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
“A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth.”
“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
“We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
“A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.”