“What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.”

“The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know.”

“I've been in love with you for weeks.'There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'Haven't you ever been in love, then?'When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'What the hell does that mean?'We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.”

“Our friends started life with too many beliefs -- the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighted down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. to work their way back to the fundamental ones -- what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? -- they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief...it is nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.”

“Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad”

“What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead”

“to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing”