“There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.”

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.

Choosing nonviolence does not mean that one will never get angry or become upset with others, including the ones we love.

Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority.

There’s nothing like being a Texan, and I’m proud to be one.

If you believe that the world is going to come to an end – and perhaps any day now – does it not drain one’s motivation to improve life on earth while we’re here?

Your goal in life must be to always move higher and higher up the food chain, where you alone control the direction of your enterprise and depend on no one.

If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.

Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?