I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself..

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams..

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude..

We know nothing. Absolutely nothing..

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purp….

But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood i….

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant..

So imagine a fire going -- wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains -- and one of t….

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal..

And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up myster….

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing..

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen..

God pity the poor novelist..

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place..