The best thing about being God would be making the heads.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.