"It's a wise person who monotonizes existence because then each small incident, if one knows how to read it in a literary way, has a wondrous quality." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

"The best thing to do is to travel and to lose all theories, lose them all." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"It is characteristic of the imagination to always consider itself to be at the end of an era.  ... But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era.  ... It exists in every civilization. ... [I]n our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically.  ... The apocalypse demands a lack of seriousness.  ... Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety.  Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we're all going to die together or separately. ... In the end ... the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously, because actually ... what it offers ... is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of ... something to do in the future." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

"The downfall of the believer is finding his Church."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris

"We've all fallen prey to uttering hackneyed and schmaltzy phrases, referring to the previous night as 'an unforgettable evening.'  But, at the end of life, only those who really haven't experienced unforgettable evenings are ridiculous, [Fernando] Pessoa would say."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris

"What makes us mad can never be doubt, but rather certainty, any certainty."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris

When the treasured Enrique Vila-Matas says that "Occasionally my sense of irony reaches Paris itself" (within the delightful Never Any End to Paris), we might add that it's a longer journey than one might think, when one factors in the meanderings of the Seine.

Speaking of irony, we love this Vila-Matas original: "Irony is the highest form of sincerity."

"I write so as not to be written.  For many years I was written in my life, I acted out a story.  I suppose I write in order to write others, to operate on the imagination, the revelation, the knowledge of others." —Fogwill, qtd. in Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (an author well-worth investigating!)

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Jeff writes:

As Marcel Bénabou writes in Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, "Above all, dear reader, do not believe that the books I have not written are pure nothingness.  On the contrary (let it be clear once and for all), they are held in suspension in universal literature."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.

"For pygmies, if you don't fall down laughing, your laughter is incomplete."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady

"To know oneself well is a bore and leads nowhere."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady

"To recall with a memory that is not our own is ... a perfect metaphor for literary experience."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady

"To speak in book means to read the world as if it were the continuation of a never-ending text."
—Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady