The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

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

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

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.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

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.