“One should read Borges more.”

For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.

Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.

If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

You run risks. That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny’s whims.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

Every hundred feet the world changes.

We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

I’d obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

The surest way to be deceived is to consider oneself cleverer than others.

Politeness is a desire to be treated politely, and to be esteemed polite oneself.

But there’s certainly only one thing I could never agree with George Galloway on. He’s a teetotaller and wants to close all the bars in the House of Commons. That is just not on.

To forgive oneself? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

If ever there was a time for a PM ready and able to do the job from day one, this is it.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.

One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else.