Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.

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

My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

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.