If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.

The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.

Live with no time-out.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.