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

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.