Every man should be capable of all ideas.
Lully’s machine, Mill’s fear and Lasswitz’s chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.
Each thing implies the universe.
I have always come to life after coming to books.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the otherslike a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.
Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
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.
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral...
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.