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.

You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.