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.

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

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?