All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism. To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral. I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes. To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment. Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger. Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. To speak is to fall into tautology. I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me...

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA. A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety. Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited. Doubt is one of the names of intelligence. To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely. "Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?" — Abel answered. "I don't remember anymore; here we are, together, like before." —
"Now I know that you have truly forgiven me," — Cain said, "because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget." Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men... If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it. To think is to forget.

Reading... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity. One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn. Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved. The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

To think, analyze and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end. I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. 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.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis – obviously an unproven one – that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. 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. We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights. From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me. The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary. Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read. Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits. Time is living me. He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety. The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men. Why should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today’s newspaper.

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much. I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare. Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.