It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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.
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying 'wolf, wolf' came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying 'wolf, wolf' and there was no wolf behind him.
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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.
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.