“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”

“Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But t...”

“One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.”

“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”

“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone ru...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness,...”

“Hungry men are not known for their patience or their kindness.”

“Hunger does not come from body; it comes from mind. Once a person starts to feel hungry all the time, nothing satisfies him whatsoever. This hunger covers up all the aspects of life ... The only th...”

“Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Child...”

“Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the ...”

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”