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.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.