“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page”

“One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.”

“Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the...”

“absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I...”

“But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic perso...”

“Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.”

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”

“Nature: it might be the magical key to unlock a locked imagination.”

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

“Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.”

“...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects abou...”

“Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor. ”