I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.Collection: Love
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.Collection: Death
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.Collection: Dreams
I confess, I do not believe in time.Collection: Time
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.Collection: Art
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.Collection: Imagination
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.Collection: Teacher
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.Collection: Imagination
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.Collection: Funny
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.Collection: Poetry
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.Collection: Nature
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.Collection: Two
Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.Collection: Stars
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.Collection: Inspirational
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.Collection: Loneliness
And the rest is rust and stardust.Collection: Rust
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.Collection: Curiosity
Genius is finding the invisible link between things.Collection: Genius