“Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.”
“Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.”
“Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.”
“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”
“Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.”
“The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.”
“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.”
“Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.”
“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”
“Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.”
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
“He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.”
“Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.”
“The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.”
“Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”
“The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.”
“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.”
“These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ''competence.'' Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”
“Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.”
“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
“Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.”
“It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.”
“Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.”