It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

Our concern with history is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.