Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.
Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining...
When you reach my age, you realize you couldn’t have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.
I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.
Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.
We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.
All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.