The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner.

There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.

The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.