I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.