Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.

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 choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing