“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Wake up, Carolee, the plane is waiting for us, we have to get to the game.

Reached only by boat, seaplane and, with less surety, telephone-this is Fire Island.

The first time I went inside a plane, I was 15 years old and I had so much fun.

On a plane or on a train, or whatever, you see people with their headphones and they’re looking at their iPhone or their Galaxy.

And you can’t go anywhere in the sky unless you have a plane or some kind of rocket.

I hate flying. Know why? Because no one really understands how planes actually work.

After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?