But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.

Desire has no history.