I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.