Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

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.

If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.