The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.