We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means...
That is a real attitude – to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
Love is wiser than wisdom.
Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.
Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!
Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.
A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
I don’t know, maybe we’re always looking for the right place, maybe it’s within reach, but we don’t recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.
And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.