On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.