Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

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

...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.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.