We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

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.

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.