I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

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.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.