Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.
I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.