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" Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. "

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" All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. "

" Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. "

" He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. "

" Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. "

" People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still. "

" True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. "

" Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. "

" Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight. "

" I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative. "

" No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad. "

" Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. "

" Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. "

" I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that. "

" No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches. "

Change The World

" To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth. "

" The best actors do not let the wheels show. "

" A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea. "

" The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. "

" I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. "

" A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. "

" The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. "

" No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. "

Human Condition

" For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? "

" Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. "

" The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people. "

" Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. "

" Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. "

" The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. "

" There are no small parts. Only small actors. "

" The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness. "