The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Sometimes a bit of compassion and decency is reason enough to do something out of the ordinary.

Elvis is the soul of discretion.

Hope is a mistake. If you cant fix what's broken, you will go insane.

Luck implies an absolute absence of any principle.

I don't like paying 50 per cent of tax.

I'm not, like, Daniel Day Lewis. Yet. I will get there!

My husband melted my heart the day he asked me, "Can I participate in your wonder?" In whose wonder do you get to participate today?

Suddenly you've worked yourself up to the top of the pecking order and you say to yourself, okay, this is going to be fun.

It's weathered many a storm, but the British film industry is, thankfully, still afloat.

Cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.