Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

In its world, there are no names, nor past, nor future, only the sureness of the present moment.

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary.

Misery requires paradises lost.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.