A Classic Is A Book Which With

Cities, Like Dreams, Are Made Of Desires And Fears, Even If The Thread Of Their Discourse Is Secret, Their Rules Are Absurd, Their Perspectives Deceitful, And Everything Conceals Something Else.

...and Every Wednesday The Perfumed Young Lady Slips Me A Hundred-crown Note To Leave Her Alone With The Convict. And By Thursday The Hundred Crowns Are Already Gone In So Much Beer. And When The Visiting Hour Is Over, The Young Lady Comes Out With The Stink Of Jail In Her Elegant Clothes; And The Prisoner Goes Back To His Cell With The Lady's Perfume In His Jailbird's Suit. And I'm Left With The Smell Of Beer. Life Is Nothing But Trading Smells.

In An Age When Other Fantastically Speedy, Widespread Media Are Triumphing, And Running The Risk Of Flattening All Communication Onto A Single, Homogenous Surface, The Function Of Literature Is Communication Between Things That Are Different Simply Because They Are Different, Not Blunting But Even Sharpening The Differences Between Them, Following The True Bent Of Written Language.

Literature Remains Alive Only If We Set Ourselves Immeasurable Goals, Far Beyond All Hope Of Achievement. Only If Poets And Writers Set Themselves Tasks That No One Else Dares Imagine Will Literature Continue To Have A Function.

Though I Leave The House As Little As Possible, I Have The Impression That Someone Is Disturbing My Papers. More Than Once I Have Discovered That Some Pages Were Missing From My Manuscripts. A Few Days Afterward I Would Find The Pages In Their Place Again. But Often I No Longer Recognize My Manuscripts, As If I Had Forgotten What I Had Written, Or As If Overnight I Were So Changed That No Longer Recognized Myself In The Self Of Yesterday.