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

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallization and wings that open to the light.

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.