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" A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. "

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" Optimism is the opium of the people. "

" Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. "

" When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible. "

" Happiness is the longing for repetition. "

" Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought. "

" The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. "

" Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. "

" In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. "

" I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. "

" Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. "

" Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. "

" Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. "

" To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth. "

" For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? "

" 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. "

Change The World

" Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries. "

" I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that. "

" Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. "

" The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness. "

" I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative. "

" 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. "

" Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. "

" I find myself fascinating. "

" No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad. "

" Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. "

" Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. "

" There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. "

" Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. "

" Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. "

" He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. "