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

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor . . .

Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.