Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.

Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.