Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
My father and he had one of those English friendships which begins by avoiding the intimacies and eventually eliminates speech altogether.
I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries – embrace every posibility.
There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.
When I feel I’m going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.
Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.
As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I’ve always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.
I think it’s all to the good that a writer shouldn’t be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on.
I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.
I don’t think there’s any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough – in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time – I never think of myself as a thinker.
I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.
I don’t think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.