Something is wrong in the house.

Sooner or later the house will get the best of you. It will defy your attempts at narrative because it's opposed to content; it only honors form.

Forces are manifested in poems which do not pass through the circuits of knowledge.

How many dreams told objectively, have become nothing but oneirism reduced to dust! In the presence of an image that dreams, it must be taken as an invitation to continue the daydream that created it.

The dark second-floor appartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked heat of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor; the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon. (p.3)

But on the other side of the fence, behind that jungle of summer in which the stupidity of weeds reigned unchecked, there was a rubbish heap on which thistles grew in wild profusion. No one knew that there, on that refuse dump, the month of August had chosen to hold that year its pagan orgies. There pushed against the fence and hidden by the elders, stood the bed of the half-wit girl, Touya, as we all called her. On a heap of discarded junk of old saucepans, abandoned single shoes, and chunks of plaster, stood a bed, painted green, propped up on two bricks where one leg was missing. The air over that midden, wild with the heat, cut through by the lightning of shiny horseflies, driven mad by the sun, crackled as if filled with invisible rattles, exciting one to a frenzy. (p.6)

In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monolgue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria's time -- the time imprisoned in her soul -- had left her and -- terribly real -- filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen. (p.7)

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it -- lessens its immediacy and depth, weakens its muscles and dilutes its blood.

Living with alcohol is living with death close at hand. What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.

When you're writing, a kind of instinct comes into play. What you're going to write is already there in the darkness. It's as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of tenses. Between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it's all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up in meaninglessness. The image of a black block in the middle of the world isn't far out.

It's almost a question of muscles, of physical dexterity. You have to move faster than the non-writing part of you, which is always up there on the plane of thought, always threatening to fade out, to disappear into limbo as far as the future story is concerned; the part which will never descend to the level of writing, which refuses all drudgery.

Writing isn't just the telling of stories. It's the exact opposite. It's telling everything at once.

And some things remain unknown even to the author. In my case, some of the things Lol V. Stein does, some of the risks she takes... I can't translate it or convey its meaning because I'm completely with Lol V. Stein and she herself doesn't quite know what she's doing or why.

I've talked a lot about writing. But I don't know what it is.

Now that I know it I no longer have the word to say it. It's just there, and it can't be named anymore.

...wherever you think imagination is absent, that's where it's at its most powerful.

A writer who hasn't known women, who has never touched a women's body and perhaps never read any books or poems written by a women, and yet thinks he's been involved in literature, is mistaken.

The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a women, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness.

When cities are bombed there are always ruins and corpses left. But you can drop an atomic bomb in the sea and ten minutes later it's back as it was before. You can't change the shape of water.

A large chandelier showered golden light on the crowd as I surveyed the party in the bronze mirror over the mantel. I was startled to spot someone I barely recognized: myself. Blue button-down, sports jacket, third or fourth drink--I was losing count--leaning against the wall like I was holding it up. I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party, but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.

Her name was Jeannie, but no sane man would ever dream of her

I quit reading when I got to the line about the crow having to shave.

The current of the crowd wanted to sweep me along with it. The green lights on the street corners ordered me to cross the street, the policemen smiled to invite me to walk between the silver-headed nails. Even the autumn leaves obeyed the current. But I broke away from it like a fallen piece. I swerved out and stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the quays. Below me flowed a river. Not like the current I had just broken from, made of dissonant pieces colliding rustily, made of hunger and desire.

Am I pushing or dying? the light up there, the immense round blazing white light is drinking me. It drinks me slowly, inspires me into space. If I do not close my eyes, it will drink all of me. I seep upward, in long icy threads, too light, and yet inside me there is a fire too, the nerves are twisted, there is no rest from this long tunnel dragging me, or am I pushing myself out of the tunnel, or is the child being pushed out of me, or is the light drinking me. Am I dying? The ice in the veins, the cracking of the bones, this pushing in darkness, with a small shaft of light in the eyes like the edge of the knife, the feeling of a knife cutting the flesh, the flesh somewhere is tearing as if it were burned through by a flame, somewhere my flesh is tearing and the blood is spilling out. I am pushing in the darkness, in utter darkness.

What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she has to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe--since I love her--that if Lol is silent in daily life, it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter, it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the moment and the future themselves. By its absence this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, oh! you've no idea how many their are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along the horizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does not exist, is nonetheless there: it awaits you just around the corner of language, it defies you--never having been used--to raise it, to make it arise from its kingdom, which is pierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.