''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.''
''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.''
''Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.''
''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.''
''To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.''
''That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.''
''The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.''
''The central problem of novel-writing is causality.''
''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.''
''Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.''
''Every writer "creates" his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.''
''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.''
''Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.''
''Life and death have been lacking in my life.''
''Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.''
''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.''
''Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.''
''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.''
''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.''
''The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.''
''In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.''
