Happiness is the longing for repetition.

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

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

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

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.

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

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

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