All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.