The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.
Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.
True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.
In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.
People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.