To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

The work of memory collapses time.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic slice of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

Nobody does good to men with impunity.

Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more.

When I was young, I was on a real hot streak with 'Crazy Climber.' There was a good three-week span where I couldn't get that game out of my head. I could not get back to the arcade fast enough to try and climb up there and not get kicked by a potted plant this time. That one got under my skin.

There's definitely a luxury to the fluidity of not being a mega-star. I've done a ton of really, really odd, off-the-wall movies. There's this movie I did called 'Queens of Country' a couple of summers ago that is so bananas, and if I was at a certain level, I probably would not have done that movie.

Trust dies but mistrust blossoms.

When I first got the audition for Shado, I went online and subscribed to DC Comics and read a bunch on Shado and the Yakuza, just to get to know her character better.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

I never have to this day, because my money is the money I earn.

My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.