Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

We make our own truths and lies....Truths are often lies and lies truths...

The chief trouble with jazz is that there is not enough of it; some of it we have to listen to twice.

When you see something every day, it gets into your brain.

In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship.

It is a very high stage in the path of love when man really learns to love another with a love that asks no return.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.

A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

Between repetition and forgetting, it is a marvel that a new thought ever struggles into existence.