The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

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.

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.