Richard Eder quotes:

Fully stripped down, an onion is a pile of scattered layers; it has no center.

Schneider's characters, like Kundera's, are sentient and sophisticated figures at a time when the constraints of Communist rule persist but its energy has entirely vanished.

A prettiness mummified by years of chalk dust.

In the middle of the silence in a writer's house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.

Words are the legs of the mind; they bear it about, carry It from point to point, bed it down at night, and keep it off the ground and out of the marsh and mists.