The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.