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

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

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

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

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.

Life itself is a quotation.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

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

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

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

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.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

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.

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

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

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

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

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

Man's memory shapes Its own eden within.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us or renders us phantasmal.

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

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

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

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.