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.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.