If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie

We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily

I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.