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… - Jorge Luis Borges

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. [...] The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable....

Thinking, meditating, imagining are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.