There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels 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.

I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one.

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

Joaquin Sabina is one of my favorites. He's like a legend. He's like our Bob Dylan, or our Bruce Springsteen. He's one of the most talented writers of our Latin music.

People have different views of how you deal with different issues in literature, and, frankly, long may it last that there is a range of views.

In fall 1967, I was given leave of absence by the National Public Affairs Research Foundation to move to Redondo Beach, California, to work on a short-term research contract with TRW.

Nothing is so high and above all danger that is not below and in the power of God. [Lat., Nihil ita sublime est, supraque pericula tendit Non sit ut inferius suppositumque deo.]

Don't be serious about seriousness. Laugh about it, be a little foolish. Don't condemn foolishness; it has its own beauties.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact — everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Trickle down economics creates a nation of peons.