“Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.”

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.

The trick to any profession is making it look easy.

Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop, sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

I don’t think about one trick or the other, they just happen.

I don’t think about one trick or the other, they just happen.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

The trick isn’t adding stuff, it’s taking away.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.