The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

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.

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

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Ink, a Drug.

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

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do.