“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”

“Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.”

“Love is poetry, poetry is love”

“Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write.”

“given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love.”

“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, "that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter." There is no doubt: this laughter goes "far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule." The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing at anything concrete, their laughter has no object; it is an expression of being rejoicing at being... and in this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the immediate present of the world, and needs no other knowledge.”

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”