Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.