I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

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

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don't think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.

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