To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.

Writing is only a guided dream.

As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.