The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.

I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.