 A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. |
| Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. |
| You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. |
| The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. |
| There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity. |
| I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. |
| Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. |
| The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. |
| 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. |
| I confess, I do not believe in time. |
| I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading. |
| A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. |
| Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. |
| The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. |
| It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. |
| It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. |
| Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. |
| To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute. |
| Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. |
| The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. |
