When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.

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.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

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

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.