My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.