Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.

The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.

One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.