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Success is a great deodorant. -Elizabeth Taylor |
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The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It...
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only...
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of...
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes...
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question:...
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Source: The Joke, pt. 3, ch. 3 (1967; tr....
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of...
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Source: In
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
Source: On...
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going...
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Source:...
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten...
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the...
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
Source: Immortality, pt. 1, ch. 6 (1991).
--...
A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be...
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be...
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, ahistorical accidents, soon...