“In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.”

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within.

You can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.

Death is just infinity closing in.

In fact, many of the quotes in my books are quotes which were translated from English and that I read already translated into Spanish.

I’m not really concerned with what the original version in English was, because the important thing for me is that I received them already translated, and they’ve influenced my original worldview as translations, not as original quotations.

Not even I, in my original Spanish, am necessarily obliged to make exact quotations. I can do that or not,

When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.