Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

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

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.