The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

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

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become