This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

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

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.