You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.

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.

When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.

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

If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.