As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

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

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

A constant interrogation.

...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.

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