There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that’s formalism.

Premie' re approximation: j'e cris pour de truire, en les de crivant avec pre cision, des monstres nocturnes qui menacent d'envahir ma vie e veille e. First general point: I write to destroy, by describing exactly the nocturnal monsters that threaten to invade my waking life.

Le lecteur, lui non plus, ne voit pas les choses du dehors. Il est dans le labyrinthe aussi. The reader [as well as the main character] does not view the work from outside. He too is in the labyrinth.

To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.

Memory belongs to the imagination.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

What do young girls dream of? Of the knife and of blood.

the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.

Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

On n'e chappe pas a' son sort. One cannot escape destiny.

Deux me' tresou un peu plusse parent donc l'homme de la femme. Two metres, or a little more, separates a man from a woman.

Et une fois de plus je m'avan c° ais le long de ces me mes couloirs, marchant depuis des jours, depuis des mois, depuis des anne es, a' votre rencontre. And one more time, I advanced along these same hallways, walking for days, for months, for years, to meet you.

The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion - that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change. To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying.