Banality is sometimes striking.

I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.

To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.

That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

In homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality.