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

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.