What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?

I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.

Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.