“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.”

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

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.

At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.

It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day.

One thing that’s true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they’re not just in love for a day or a week.

And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not…not be able to do what I want with you.

I will say that if my wildest dreams come true, I will, like, wake up one day, and I will be Carol Dweck, right? Because she is like everything I want to be.

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills.