“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

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.

What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

The Bible has affected their lives, but in translation, since they do not read the Bible in the original Greek or Hebrew.

Rent is the portion of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the user of the original and indestructible powers of the soil

I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths.

I am who I am and that’s who I am.