La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.

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