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A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.

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I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just a...more

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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

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Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

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Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, th...more

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If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of ...more

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Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goal...more

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I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careles...more

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In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogen...more

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It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics...more

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This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas ...more

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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

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There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of ...more