"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."

"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."

"The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing."

"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."

"Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."

"Life and death have been lacking in my life."

"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left."

"Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art."

"The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."

"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."

"Democracy is an abuse of statistics."

"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."

"Life itself is a quotation."

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

"I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks."

"Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic."

"Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is."

"In general, every country has the language it deserves."

"Reality is not always probable, or likely."

"The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future."

"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."

"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."

"Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned."

"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."