“Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist.”

“...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....”

“It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.”

“and finally there was the sleepless nightwhen i decided to explore and fightthe foul, the inadmissible abyss,devoting all my twisted life to thisone task. today i'm sixty-one. waxwingsare berry-pecking. a cicada sings.”

“If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be "To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.”

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

“He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.”