When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.

it’s true this world our breathing laboured inspires nothing more than obvious disgust a desire to flee without our share and no longer read the headlines we long to return to our ancestral home where our forebears once lived under an angel’s wing we long to find that strange morality which sanctified life to the end we crave something like loyalty like the embrace of mild addictions something that transcends yet contains life we cannot live far from eternity

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

I prefer reading to writing. Reading changes your world view. Writing changes absolutely nothing. Except, of course, when it makes you rich.

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.