To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

a man possessed with peace is always smiling

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