“A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.”

Books
There are books that talk about the Panama Canal
I don’t know what the card catalogs say
And I don’t pay any attention to the financial pages

The guillotine is the masterpiece of plastic art

Down in the valley you see that telegraph line whose rectilinear path cuts through the forest on the mountain across the way
All the poles are made of iron

Christ
Here it’s been more than a year since I thought of You

You said if you write me
Don’t type everything
Add a line in your own hand

Some very mean people have just blown up the bridge

Around here the countryside is one of the most beautiful in North America
The immense sheet of the lake is an almost white blue

There are books filled with nothing but descriptions of sunsets

Noon
Midnight
Shit is said in all the corners of the universe

Three prisoners get a hold of guns
They kill their jailer and grab the prison keys
They come running out of their cells and kill four guards in the courtyard

I’m dying from the heat in my cabin and I can’t air it out for fear of exposing my little family of little animals to the air current
Too bad

I told you
When you buy monkeys
You have to take the ones that are very lively and who almost scare you

Gustave Lerouge, who died several years ago on the eve of the Second World War, was the author of 312 works (in any case, that is the number of his works in my library), many of which were in several volumes and one, Le Mysterieux Docteur Cornelius, was a 150-page masterpiece of scientific detective fiction in 56 installments; others were not even signed since Gustave Lerouge often worked for publishers of the seventeenth order. 

I am surprised that no novelist of today has yet devoted a work to the automobile, to the modern highway, to road side inns, to gallant adventures of the road such as Casanova celebrated in his Memories, which were full of post-chaises and hostelries familiar to travelers at the end of the Eighteenth century; or as George Borrow in The Bible in Spain wrote of adventures and encounters along the road in Spain at the beginning of the Twentieth century (a little in the manner ofL’Intineraire Espagnol of t’Sterstevens, except that Borrow hadn’t gone to Spain to write a book—that would never have occurred to him—but to distribute the book of books, the Bible, in Spain, and particularly to distribute it—queer idea!—to the gypsies).