“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Getting something and having the wits to use it…those are two different things.

I have no idea what my teacher’s intentions were – whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.

I’m a closet nerd. I love to study history and visit museums.

The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

I have just returned from visiting the Marines at the front, and there is not a finer fighting organization in the world!

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.