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... kids were deserting literature and history to get rich in finance, and we the old guard, argued against it all and defended our shrinking corner of the humanities, not yet underfunded, but demoralized, our old centrality to the culture gone, our subjects sunk in the postmodern turmoil of civil wars over theory, or race, or gender, or social exclusion - battles that were mostly generational and unnaturally fierce.

The imagined lords it over the actual - no paradox or mystery there. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.

But each time, after a while, they would remember those trips more generously, as if the act of remembering could alter the experience itself.

On their screens -everywhere, all the time- acquaintances and schoolmates and strangers from around the world would share all that was beautiful in their lives. The images followed no logical thread beyond their own splendor: vintage clothes and filtered selfies, snow-covered forests, crystalline coastlines, bright, airy apartments, book covers, cupcakes, flowers, wild animals, galaxies, contemporary art shows, feet.

Even their moods were new, which is why they had no commonly recognized name. Instead, they would be described in terms borrowed from other, vaguely related types of experience, all of which fell short of expressing an inner landscape reconfigured by twenty years of the internet.

The huge country house where they will stay, a piece in the stone necklace that is strung across all of France, the piers upon which her history is founded. They have opened their doors to travelers, these chateaux. The great rooms, eloquent in their calm, may be taken by anyone, rooms that have seen the light and darkness of ages.People can now walk around them in underclothes, lie in the beds like drunken servants.

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move. Despite it all, I could have been happy, a quiet happiness to be sure, but happy, nonetheless. I could have found it very pleasant to walk into town if the weather were nice - things like that. It is knowledge that poisons us, events one would hesitate to imagine.

For once she had the sense that her meaning did not sink away into layers of emotion and despair, or glance off, bootless or alien, as it did with Jules or Clara, but bounced back to her, cleared and aired, like coins rung upon a counter for what they might be worth.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...
Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks.
La vie, voyez-vous, ca n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit.

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers - he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves.
And this saddened him.

People like it when you tell them things in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings....
...What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook.

Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I’m not looking.

He was reaching that age when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.

I like the person I am in my stories better than I like the real me. That person is smarter, wittier, more patient, funnier - his view of the world is wiser.
When I stop writing and come back to myself, I feel more limited, opinionated, and petty.
But what a pleasure it was, to have been, on the page, briefly less of a dope than usual.

The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a "built-in, shockproof, shit detector."
How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it.

It is not to be supposed that the stamp and feeling of a novel can be conveyed by an intellectual summary.

...but since then I've come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.

A planet's orbit is affected by the gravitational forces of the sun and other bodies around it so that it moves in relation to others. With the others gone, the course of my orbit has shifted. There must be a name for what I'm experiencing.

Unless it can be proven to me-to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard and my putrefaction-that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy, local palliative of articulate art.

Unless it can be proven to me-to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard and my putrefaction-that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and local palliative of articulate art.

Milan Kundera died yesterday, at 94, in Paris. I'm sad, I count myself among those who were largely influenced by his work.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

From his interviews to Philip Roth in 1980.
Now they are both gone and the world is a poorer place.

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep.

We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo pollex of science, with all its many subspecies and forms: the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki's viatic appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic...

What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita - perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no conciousness - indeed, no life of her own.