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And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about.

— Известно Кто, Известно Где.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

— William Butler Yeats, Sailing To Byzantium.

Мы так же бессильны понять смысл дракона, как и смысл Вселенной, но в образе дракона есть нечто взывающее к человеческому воображению, и мы находим драконов в точно определенных местах и эпохах. Для человечества дракон, так сказать, необходимое чудовище, не то что случайные, "одноразовые" химеры или катоблепасы.

— Хорхе Луис Борхес, Книга вымышленных существ. Предисловие к первому изданию.

I scarcely remember counting upon happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

— John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817).

Комментатор не в праве уклоняться от принятых им на себя обязательств.

— Владимир Набоков, Бледное пламя.

I am not being fanciful, simply precise.

I have admitted I am writing a story, I have to recognize — a first-person story proper, an autobiography.
I detest autobiography. Slippery, unreliable, and worse, imprecise. (I am trying to avoid the problem of the decay of belief in the idea of objectivity by slipstreaming towards the safer, ideologically unloaded idea of precision. I don't think this tactic quite works.) Autobiograpy, as I write, is fashionable. The "flavour of the moment". (Can I penetrate a phrase like that? Let it stand. Try anything once.) Everyone is writing his or her "memoir". They resemble each other. They are rather repulsive. I was brought up as a child to believe in self-effacement, and as a student to believe in impersonality.

Interesting to know, whether this precision — which has cost me a lot of pencil biting, staring into space, imagining absent odours with intense recollected pleasure — would communicate accurately to anyone else?
I'm getting baroque. Back to what I was writing, which was a renunciation of writing.

— A.S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale.

Бывало, писал каждый день. Думал, я существую только чтобы вечером рассказывать о том, что пережил днём.

— Умберто Эко, Баудолино.