The Letter Killers Club (New York Review Books Classics)

I’m giving the words back; all except one: life.*

“I think this is all fairly simple: every three-dimensional being doubles himself twice—reflecting himself outwardly and inwardly. Both reflections are untrue: the cold, flat likeness returned by the looking glass is untrue because it is less than three-dimensional; the face’s other reflection, cast inward, flowing along nerves to the brain and com

words are spiteful and tenacious—anyone who tries to kill them will sooner be killed by them.

Rubbish. Spectators: if you took their coats off the hooks in the cloakroom and seated them in the theater, and hung those spectators on the cloakroom hooks instead, art would not suffer.

By replacing the jolts from individual wills with the jolts from one “ethical machine” built according to the latest advances in morals and technology, one could make everyone give everything back: a complete ex.

Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip.

no one searching emptiness has ever managed to find anything.

“Well, I decided—I hope you won’t find this strange—to plant a garden immured in silence and secrecy in which all my conceptions, all my most exquisite phantasms and monstrous inventions might, far from people’s eyes, grow and bloom for themselves.

I don’t have a way with words; it is they that have had their way with me, conscripting me as a weapon of revenge.