When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.