...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. ("America: Three Audiences")

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.

...evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire")

I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe.

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

A wise word is more rare than the green emerald, and one can find the word of wisdom even amongst the slave girls making grain.

Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

I don't think you can run for president or be president unless you're a busy person.

Being pretty on the inside means you don't hit your brother and you eat all your peas - that's what my grandma taught me.

Playing Chelsea is as tough a test as you'll get in Europe these days.

I've been with certain stars; some are caring and pay attention to their fans and to their fellow performers and some are too busy. Elvis never seemed too busy.

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.