And do you know what it means to have class? To be, in the final instance, a sovereign entity.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

In this country we’ve always confused clarity with stubbornness, don’t you think? We think we’re clear-sighted when in fact we’re stubborn.

According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth, Archimboldi ended his letter.

“The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.

When King Solomon ordered the Temple of Jerusalem to be built, he strictly forbade the use of iron as a support in the construction,

On the ride back to the hotel, they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn’t the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn’t make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued,

Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited.

“You know,” complained Espinoza in his conversations with Pelletier, perhaps seeking some consolation, “we Spaniards have always been provincials.”