“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the ...”

“...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it...”

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”

“We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”

“Fiction has the ability to show us what we dont know and what doesnt happen.”

“When you dont know what to believe, when youre not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands o...”

“Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.”

“Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he useless...”

“We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it foreve...”

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”

“All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.”

“Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.”