“Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not.”

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.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

Life itself is a quotation.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

Twenty-five years ago, people talked about their obligations and responsibilities.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

We are never quits with those who oblige us,” was Dantes’ reply; “for when we do not owe them money, we owe them gratitude.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.

It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict – which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.

Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.

The Sicilian Defence was our attempt at quickly fulfilling our contractual obligation after I Robot, Pyramid and Eve had been delivered.