A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.