These are too good, I won't spoil them with my comments. Not in this entry anyway.

BORDER. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch." (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).

COMIC. By providing us with the lovely illusion of human greatness, the tragic brings us consolation. The comic is crueler: it brutally reveals the meaningless of everything. I suppose all things human have their comic aspect, which in certain cases is recognized, acknowledged, utilized, and in others is veiled. The real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic. History has always been considered an exclusively serious territory. But there is the undiscovered comic side to history. Just as there is the (hard-to-take) comic side to sexuality.

DEFINITION. ... A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions.

FLOW. ... I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods.

LAUGHTER. ... In the nineteenth century, Gogol is a melancholy humorist: "The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes," said he.

LYRICISM (and revolution). "Poetry is intoxication, and man drinks in order to merge more easily with the world. Revolution has no desire to be examined or analyzed; it only desires that the people merge with it. For that reason, revolutions are lyrical and in need of lyricism" (Life is everywhere).

OBCSENITY. We can use obscene word in a foreign language, but they are not heard as such. An obscenity pronounced with an accent becomes comical. The difficulty of being obscene with a foreign woman. Obscenity: the root that attaches us most deeply to our homeland.