“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

How we choose to combat that challenge is often life-defining. You can face difficulties head-on, or run from them, or ignore them until they consume you. But no one escapes conflict. No one.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and better goods can be produced and consumed.

I couldn’t escape him, now or ever. He’d always be there, consuming my every thought, my heart locked in his hands. I was drawn to him by forces i couldn’t control, let alone escape.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.

Music is everywhere – you consume it every day, everywhere you go. The content creator should be compensated. It’s only fair.

There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people.