If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.