Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.