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

And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart-a head here, a broken body and three lumps of coal there-and one day he looked up from a piece of snow-colored rice paper and knew he was done. It was as simple as that: you bent over your work night after night, and one day you were done. Snow still lay in dirty streaks on the ground but clusters of yellow-green flowers hung from the sugar maples.

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

God pity the poor novelist.

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

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

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.