The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.

You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.

A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.

Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.