what's the matter?" he asked "nothing" "what do you want me to do for you?" "i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older" what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.

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.

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.

In life they're not going to serve you lemons, they're going to serve you lemonade; and I don't really like lemonade because I've got a really bad acid reflux.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

I realize that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.

Long time ago when we were fab, back when income tax was all we had.

There's one thing I never did do, and that was stink.

('Stairway to Heaven' is) a nice pleasant, well-meaning naive little song, very English. It's not the definitive Led Zeppelin song. 'Kashmir' is.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.