“One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.”

“But no one can lose sight of what he desires. Even if there are moments when he believes the world and the others are stronger. The secret is this: do not surrender.”

“Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.”

“Sex is one of the situations where all things submerged in our subconscious come out, all fears, all desires, all the violence, and all the needs. That's why sex, in my opinion, is never as easy as television shows or jokes present it to be. We are often told that taking pleasure, especially from sex, and surrendering to it are things that happen naturally, gestures that come for free. I find it harder, instead, to learn how to surrender than to learn how to resist. That's exactly what my characters suffer from: the difficulty of covering the distance between desires and their fulfillments, the difficulty of doing "easy" things, such as kissing a girl or lying in bed with her, difficulties that are not only due to external causes, but also often to internal ones.”

“One must do no violence to nature, nor model it in conformity to any blindly formed chimera.”

“The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.”