We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.

Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.