If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every e….

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing….

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord..

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and pervers….

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said….

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives..

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world..

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision..

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things..

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie..

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make an….

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb..

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top..

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do..

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ..….

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young..

I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remot….

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windo….

It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexha….

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered..