Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

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.

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.