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.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

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?

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.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

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?

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