A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.

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

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

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

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.