I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.