“To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be.”

Memory belongs to the imagination.

The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation – a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion – that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.

What do young girls dream of? Of the knife and of blood.

Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things.

The reader [as well as the main character] does not view the work from outside. He too is in the labyrinth.

Premie’ re approximation: j’e cris pour de truire, en les de crivant avec pre cision, des monstres nocturnes qui menacent d’envahir ma vie e veille e. First general point: I write to destroy, by describing exactly the nocturnal monsters that threaten to invade my waking life.

There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: ‘You see,’ he says, ‘now that’s formalism.

It is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying.

They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants…

Deux me’ tresou un peu plusse parent donc l’homme de la femme. Two metres, or a little more, separates a man from a woman.

Le lecteur, lui non plus, ne voit pas les choses du dehors. Il est dans le labyrinthe aussi.

On n’e chappe pas a’ son sort. One cannot escape destiny.

I don’t speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don’t even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places.

Computers no longer interface with humans–they interact, and the interaction will become steadily deeper, more subtle, and more crucial to our collective sanity and ultimate survival.

The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.

It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.

Migrants come up and no longer seek to evade the Border Patrol, but are actually left at the border by their smugglers.

We can no longer let the threat of an early frost send a chill of fear throughout a large portion of our workforce.

One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.

There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.