People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.

Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.