“What is the strongest pretext for loving?...If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss.”

“Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.”

“I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall downand break your neck.”

“I need, therefore I imagine.”

“No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.”

“Did you know we know we are all the object of another's imagination?”

“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.”