“If I could live again my life, In the next - I'll try, - to make more mistakes, I won't try to be so perfect, I'll be more relaxed... I'll take fewer things seriously.. I'll take more risks, I'll take more trips, I'll watch more sunsets, I'll climb more mountains, I'll swim more rivers, I'll go to more places I've never been I'll eat more ice ...I'll have more real problems and less imaginary ones I was one of those people who live prudent and prolific lives - each minute of his life, Of course that I had moments of joy – but, if I could go back I’ll try to have only good moments,

If you don’t know – that’s what life is made of, Don’t lose the now!

If I could live again - I will travel light If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn, I'll watch more sunrises and play with more children, If I have the life to live – but now I am 85, - and I know that I am dying …”

• “Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
• “The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, as water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it further with words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?”
• “Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”
• “No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”
• “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.”
• “I am not sure that I exist, actually. 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.”
• “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
• “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
• “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.”
• “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
• “Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
• “I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”
• “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”
• “The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.”
• “Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.”
• “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.”
• “Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”
• “The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.”
• “God has created nights well-populated

with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.”