It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

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.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

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.