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This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools...more

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Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

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Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me...more

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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

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For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, ...more

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The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

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I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of h...more

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But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to e...more

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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.

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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap b...more