Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.