But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.

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.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.