When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

Some suggestions for you :

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

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.

Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.

After forty, every change becomes a symbol of time's passing.

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.