A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beats, and unforeseen elements within foreseen parameters.
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature.
Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.
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?
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.
After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
The short-story writer knows that he can’t proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
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.
Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.
Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
I can’t think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does.