Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?

Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.