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.

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

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

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.