When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

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.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.