“This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?”

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.

Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.

When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.

We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want.

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.

An author spoils everything when he wants too much to do good.

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

No matter when it was written. That the author has written his book only for me.

We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.

One that actually relates to all Latin American literature: that is, not every author is interested in being a representative of his or her national culture on the global stage.

The fiction I’ve written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time.