Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

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.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

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

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.

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

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.