The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another.

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.