All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.