To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.