When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

A necessary monster.

Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust.

Art is fire plus algebra.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it's a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it's a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don't think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.

Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

I felt what we always feel when someone dies -- the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost us to have been more loving. One forgets that one is a dead man conversing with dead men.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.