All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

When met with a problem I always ask myself what is the right thing to do and then I do it.

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.

I'm not my thoughts, I'm the thinker who has those thoughts.

The unity of all who dwell in freedom is their only sure defense.

I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them.

I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.

Fear is not always a sin but it always is an opportunity.

He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous

The media is constantly redefining what luxury is. Luxury can be a dirty sock if dressed up in the right way.