“You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.”

“I can see that you’re down in the dumps, Unc. Shall we stop working and call Toni?”“And then what?”“I don’t know. But if it so happens that I’m more of your type . . . Would you like me to give you a blow job? That really does the trick when you’re feeling depressed.”

“No one knows better than I do how far heaven is, but I also know all the shortcuts. The secret is to die, when you want to, and not when He proposes. Or else to force Him to take you before your time.”

“Experience, as we know, is deceptive: one judges the world through the prism of what has happened to oneself and considers this a just and reasonable approach, when in fact it is quite obviously the perfect tactic for never learning anything about anything.”

“If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.”

“He who praises you for what you lack wishes to take from you what you have.”

“Look, words are like the air: they belong to everybody. Words are not the problem; it's the tone, the context, where those words are aimed, and in whose company they are uttered. Of course murderers and victims use the same words, but I never read the words utopia, or beauty, or tenderness in police descriptions. Do you know that the Argentinean dictatorship burnt The Little Prince ? And I think they were right to do so, not because I do not love The Little Prince , but because the book is so full of tenderness that it would harm any dictatorship.”