One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?