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

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

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.

What is it the Bible teaches us? – raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? – to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

There is only one unpardonable sin–deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

He was attached by ties stronger than reason could break — chains, forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen.

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us.

I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.