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.

Translating is writing.

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

All happiness is a form of innocence.

It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

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.