Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment – the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence.
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
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.
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.