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"To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat- some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
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Personal Development
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
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Personal Development
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
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Personal Development
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
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"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
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Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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Personal Development
"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."
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Personal Development
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
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Personal Development
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
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"Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform."
Creativity
"To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky."
Art
"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many."
Philosophy
"With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy."
Illusion
"Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice."
Paradox
"I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body."
Imagination
"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream."
Identity
"I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self."
Philosophy
"The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt."
Drama
"In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us, we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers."
Life
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