“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.”

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books… If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

When I feel I’m going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Everything touches everything.

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.

I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer – if there is any afterlife – to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

Find that pursuit that will energize you, consume you, become an obsession.

I don’t care about vacations. I go away and I come back real quick because I like my work. I really like my work to consume me.

And then you’ll consume them however you can. For example, I don’t really watch Showtime, but I bought ‘Homeland,’ and I’ve been watching every episode on my iPad.

The same way I want to spend time filling my mind with the best information I can acquire from the best sources I can obtain, I also want to consume nourishment from the best sources for my body.

That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.

A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.

Anger is an all-consuming fire that will burn you and everyone else around you. Where is the justice in that?