You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.