The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.