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.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

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

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.