“When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler, and I think there is tragedy there.”

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“I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited... I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”

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“I think of my own opinions as being superficial... I keep them in watertight compartments... but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom”

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“So instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers, plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul.”

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“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”

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“Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”

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“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

from Labyrinths

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“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

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“We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real... Reality is not always probable, or likely.”

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“Over time you learn that real friends are few and whoever doesn’t fight for them, sooner or later, will find himself surrounded only with false friendships.”

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“Over time you learn that words spoken in moments of anger continue hurting throughout a lifetime.”

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“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

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“You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.”

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“He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.”

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“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.”

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“If I could live again my life, in the next I’ll try to make more mistakes...I’ll have more real problems – and less imaginary ones,”

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“Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension.”

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“a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.”

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“Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”

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“I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”

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“Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy... mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer.”

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“The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.”

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“I once wrote that democracy is the abuse of statistics...On October 30, 1983, Argentine democracy refuted me splendidly. Splendidly and resoundingly.”

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“Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within”

from Dreamtigers

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“There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.”

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“Life itself is a quotation.”

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“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

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“No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men.”

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“Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book... I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books... I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library... looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books.”

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“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them... I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.”

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