The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.