Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.