I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.