“Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.”

“The loss of a loved one is like the loss of a part of oneself; an arm or a leg. At first, the pain is so physical that it is hard to ignore. The trauma is so intense that the mind finds it hard to cope with the loss. With time the pain eases, the body recovers and the brain figures out new ways to go on.”

“There is a thin line that separates life from death, but once it's crossed, it becomes as large as an ocean, and so treacherous that it’s impossible to cross back.”

“It takes just one wave to capsize a boat, and one more to take it down.”

“There is a period for hope and one for mourning.”

“If the private life of the sea could ever be transposed onto paper, it would talk not about rivers or rain or glaciers or of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen, but of the millions of encounters its waters have shared with creatures of another nature.”

“Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.”