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I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.

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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

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A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes...more

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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

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I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in...more

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Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, a...more

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There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

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I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an...more

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Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, a...more

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So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature...more

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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – ...more

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I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the...more

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The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.