People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

---

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

---

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

---

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

---

a man possessed with peace is always smiling.

---

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

---

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

---

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

---

Beauty is a rebellion against time.

---

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

---