Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.