Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.