“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.”

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.

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.

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

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea.

Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.

Only a ginger, can call another ginger Ginger.

Detested sport, That owes its pleasures to another’s pain.

Not suffering another existence is reaching the Way.

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.