If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.

We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

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

We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.