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 basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.

This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself