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.

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.

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

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

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

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.