Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

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 . . .

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.

The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.

[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.