You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

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.

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.

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.