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.

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

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

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.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

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

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.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

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

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.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

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

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