“I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.”

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.

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.

I’m very into details, so I watch movies just for the details.

Devil is in the details.

When people ask about us now I say we are strangers but not the kind you may think we just happen to be strangers who know every mundane detail about each other.

You breathe, you love, you feel – and that’s enough to learn to see beauty in details. Is it not an art of living to create happiness where it does not exist?

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.