Pg10
And then I began to cry. Perhaps I cried for a whole hour. As always, it was my mother who comforted me. I didn't cy because the story was sad. I cried because I was scared of my own imgination. I was also afraid of the little man with the bamboo stick. He'd been perced on the Persian pouffe during my narrative, looking at my mother's gramophone records, but now he'd begun to pace about the room. I was the only one who could see him.
The first time I'd set my eyes on the little man in the green hat had been in a dream. But he broke out of the dream and since then he's followed me all my life. He thinks he's in charge of me.

Pg10
I'd never had any difficulty telling imagination and reality apart. The problem has always been to distinguish between recalled fantasy and recalled reality. That's quite another matter. I always knew the difference between what I was actually observing and what I only imagined I was observing. But gradually, as time went by, separating actual occurences from experiences I'd made up, could get tricky. My memory hasn't got special compartments for things I've seen and heard and things I've simply conjured up. I've only got one memory in which to store both the impression and imagination of the past: in glorious unity they combine to form what we call recollection. Despite this, I sometimes assume that my memory is failing when I occasionally mix up the two categories. This is an imperfect descriptino at best. When I recollect something as really experienced, that in truth was only a dream, it's because my memory is far too good. I've always felt it as a triumph of memory that I'm capable of recalling events that have only taken place in my head.

Pg44
"This analogy puts me in mind of Ernst Junger who wrote in one of his wartime diaries that one shouldn't grieve over a thought that gets away. It's like a fish that gets off the hook and swims down into the depths again, only to return one day even bigger... If, on the other hand, one lands the fish, guts it and chucks it into a plastic bucket, any further development of the fish has clearly been curtailed. Precisely the same can be said of the idea behind a novel once it is written out and set in more or less successful aspic, or even published. Perhaps the world of culture is charaterised by too much catch and too little release."

Pg46
"Or as Mephistopheles says as Faust dies: What matters our creative endless toil, when at a snatch oblivion ends the coil."