You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

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