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

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

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

[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.

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.