“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.

If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.

A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.

Age is never so old as youth would measure it.

Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.

In the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.

There is more to sex appeal than just measurements