You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

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.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.