A constant interrogation.

Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

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, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.