A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.