“We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

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.

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.