. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.

Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?

At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.

we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.