“We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.”

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Between 2 and 5 I’m reading in to find out what’s been going on while I’ve been asleep.

There’s a balance between ballads and kick-ass songs.

What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

There has always been a battle between good and evil.

We of the modern age are a bridge between the old human and the new one. We still have the mentality of the old human – a slave mentality, like the Children of Israel in Egypt: too controlled, full of fear.

I suppose that what I would want to acknowledge is that perhaps the tension, the crucial tension, isn’t necessarily between the view of bullfighting as a tradition versus as an art form, but between the values inside the ring and the values outside the ring.

The peacemakers shall be called the sons of God, who came to make peace between God and man. What then shall the sowers of discord be called, but the children of the devil? And what must they look for but their father’s portion?

How many husbands were floating between life and death, clinging to their wives in this world? And how may millions and millions of people were there in the world like Charlie who wouldn’t let go of their loved ones when they’re gone?