Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.