“Being a detective isn't all about torture and murder and monsters. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant… The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives.”

“You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.”

“That's bullshit. You're being deliberately unpleasant. I suppose you can't help yourself, can you?”

“A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.”

“To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.”

“Sometimes love isn't about being smart. Sometimes it's about being stupid together.”

“Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“I am sometimes also asked whether the October Crisis taught me anything about the art of governing, or about the means that were at my disposal for defusing the crisis. First of all, it taught me that you can be the prescient futurologist in the world, you can lay out the best-made plans and define your priorities with the utmost care, but if you show yourself to be incapable of managing a crisis when it arises, you will lose your right to govern and the whole thing will blow up in your face.”

“But everyone in the world has a cross. Mine is mine, yours is yours: I only can make you conscious of your cross and, apart from that, you free yourself or not. This depends on you.”