Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.