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 inexhaustible.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

She'd also called me brave...unless she was talking to the catfish.

We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.

My uncle Jimmy took liver salts twice a day for 40 years. He died on Sunday, was buried Wednesday and the following Friday they had to go to the cemetery to beat his liver to death with a stick.

I was thinking about New York and realized how much I hate walking around in the winter and how much I dread getting on the train.

Swimming in my Daddy's big nuts

When we talk about the impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, [Mandelbrot] is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.

Maybe, I got a sense when [Star Wars] came out, and there were always these lines around the block. We didn't understand the popularity of Cheers until maybe five years into the series.

The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern. But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well.

A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions