Writings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city a city almost completely faked a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.

Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes