The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

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

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

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

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.