When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don't think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.