Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

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

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.

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.