Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.
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.
If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
In fact I’m in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am – an idealist or not. I’m a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .
When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth .
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.