Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

The work of memory collapses time.

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.