Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.