Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.
I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
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.
Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?
Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.
The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.
Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.