“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.”

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.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

Life itself is a quotation.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be.

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.

Not knowing anything is the sweetest life.

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.

I don’t know how you were diverted, You were perverted too. I don’t know how you were inverted No one alerted you.

Without this sadness I wouldn’t even know who I am.

Don’t keep saying, “I don’t know where the time goes.” It goes the same place it’s always gone and no one has ever known where that is.