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 . . .

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him.

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 are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.