Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

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.

Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.