I suffer from everyday life.

There is no language without deceit.

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.

How well I would write if I were not here!

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

My university work was not central to my education.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.

It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.

I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

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