“Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.”

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

But there’s certainly only one thing I could never agree with George Galloway on. He’s a teetotaller and wants to close all the bars in the House of Commons. That is just not on.

Basically, Herman van Rompuy wants the European Union to become a debt union, which may be acceptable to some of the southern countries who are effectively bust. To the northern countries, it is not.

No deals with the Tories; it’s war.

Before, Europe was about treaties, laws and our sovereign right to govern ourselves. Now, it’s about everyday lives.

What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt?

What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.

How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding.