In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

Book Theater, Kadokawa Culture Museum, Tokyo

Nabokov’s annotated teaching copy

In Bruges

Everything that you need to know about our world can be learned by watching The Third Man.