“Censorship is the mother of metaphor.”

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.

A writer’s work is the product of laziness.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

In my next life I will try to commit more errors.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

Reality favors symmetry.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

I’ll buy metaphor, but simile’s a cop-out used by scaredycats who won’t commit to anything. Simile’s for cowards.

It’s easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.

It was easier than explaining DiMaggio’s use as a metaphor.

Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something’s time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.