If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?