I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

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.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.