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

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

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.

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