“If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.”

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

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.