i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing.