There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

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.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Any day above ground is a good day.

I have had an amazing career for a man who hits things for a living.

We are renters and borrowers and, in the end, only thieves.

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, ‘I.’

Prayerlessness is sin.

The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.

All I ask of in the world is just one day after another with nothing planned.

I trust the people who are working with me. I delegate.