“When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.”

Love is the cheapest of religions.

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

A corpse is what’s left after waking too often.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

The fiction I’ve written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time.

One of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers.

I realized I had some cultural capital to spend, and I wanted to use it to introduce another author who might be considered a risk by conventional publishers. Michael Noll was at the top of my list.

I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.

The authors pull no punches on the likelihood of increasing tensions and conflicts in a climatically constrained world and spotlight places where possible conflicts may flare up in the 21st century unless climate change is checked.

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes – even in a scientific text.

As to the origin of civil Societies or Governments; the Author of our Being, has given Man a Nature to be fitted for, and disposed to Society.

Am I in love? Absolutely. I’m in love with ancient philosophers, foreign painters, classic authors, and musicians who have died long ago. I’m a passionate lover.