The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Life itself is a quotation.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
