We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

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

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.