Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.