“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.”

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

The world is not dialectical – it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

The order of the world is always right – such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each.

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved – commitment to a scenario.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

There’s this really awesome theory of human motivation – that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.

I was probably a terrible husband, but I pride myself on being a good dad.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

Being honest doesn’t mean you say whatever you want, wherever you want. It means that what you choose to say is true.

I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.