In Love, As In Gluttony, Pleasure Is

This Is What I Mean When I Say I Would Like To Swim Against The Stream Of Time: I Would Like To Erase The Consequences Of Certain Events And Restore An Initial Condition. But Every Moment Of My Life Brings With It An Accumulation Of New Facts, And Each Of These New Facts Bring With It Consequences; So The More I Seek To Return To The Zero Moment From Which I Set Out, The Further I Move Away From It. . . .

They Knew Each Other. He Knew Her And So Himself, For In Truth He Had Never Known Himself. And She Knew Him And So Herself, For Although She Had Always Known Herself She Had Never Been Able To Recognize It Until Now.

The Things That The Novel Does Not Say Are Necessarily More Numerous Than Those It Does Say And Only A Special Halo Around What Is Written Can Give The Illusion That You Are Reading Also What Is Not Written.

My Working Method Has More Often Than Not Involved The Subtraction Of Weight. I Have Tried To Remove Weight, Sometimes From People, Sometimes From Heavenly Bodies, Sometimes From Cities; Above All I Have Tried To Remove Weight From The Structure Of Stories And From Language. . . . Maybe I Was Only Then Becoming Aware Of The Weight, The Inertia, The Opacity Of The World--qualities That Stick To The Writing From The Start, Unless One Finds Some Way Of Evading Them.

The People Who Move Through The Streets Are All Strangers. At Each Encounter, They Imagine A Thousand Things About One Another; Meetings Which Could Take Place Between Them, Conversations, Surprises, Caresses, Bites. But No One Greets Anyone; Eyes Lock For A Second, Then Dart Away, Seeking Other Eyes, Never Stopping...something Runs Among Them, An Exchange Of Glances Like Lines That Connect One Figure With Another And Draw Arrows, Stars, Triangles, Until All Combinations Are Used Up In A Moment, And Other Characters Come On To The Scene.