All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

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.

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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

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.