“The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.”

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 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.

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

With a painter’s temperament, all that’s needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations.

And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries.

Your words and wishes are cheap if they do not find expression in your actual gifts.

I think I feel rather differently about sympathy to what seems the normal view. I like just to feel it is there, but not always expressed.