Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagg… - Vladimir Nabokov

We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

Look at the harlequins! [...] All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together — jokes, images — and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.