Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes

Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.

Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.

Writings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.

At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.