Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)