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.

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

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.

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

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

God pity the poor novelist.