A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

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.

Pleasure feels better than pain. Make the pursuit of pleasure your guide.

It takes two to tango, and if you dance too long, implosion is inevitable.

Least said is soon disavowed.

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.

It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.

But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

I'm quite happy there is a man in the world who can overcome my record, finally.

If thou beest ever so exact in thy morals, and not a worshiper of God, then thou art an atheist.

O, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer!