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

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.