I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

A billion neutrinos go swimming in heavy water: one gets wet.

I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.

I can lose my temper from time to time, but I try not to lose it on the pitch because it can't help.

I am best described as just a guy with a very large bump of curiosity and a gambling instinct.

Have you seen that magazine Barely Legal? That means when you look at it, you're almost a pedophile.

We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.

Sometimes you have to be lucky, but I always say that to be lucky, you have to fight for it.

Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?