"Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering."

"The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. […] Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist."

"The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes."

"How well I would write if I were not here!"

"There is no language without deceit."

"The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible."

"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written."

"What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?"

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

"We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing."

"My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid."

"I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life"

"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."

"Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."

"There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going."

"Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex..."

"… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!"

"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."

"Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature."

"What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless."

"As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop."

"He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him."