The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

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

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times.