The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

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.

So many of the world's problems, he mused, were solved by sheer human decency.

He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies.

The heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out.

Opposition always inflames the enthusiast, never converts him.

Market prices are always wrong in the sense that they present a biased view of the future.

Being drafted by the Montreal Canadiens, that was the greatest moment in my career. And stealing the Stanley Cup in 1978 and bringing it back to my hometown of Thurso.

I like to paint paintings that I haven't seen.

Let's give the historians something to write about

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.

What we're always looking for is weird social issues and weird connections to make. Luckily for them, there's no shortage of material.