The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.