We should sense immediately, in the presence of the grotesque, that it is both “real” and “unreal” simultaneously…

–Joyce Carol Oates, “Reflections on the Grotesque”

A novel will be of a high and noble order, the more it represents of inner, and less it represents of outer life; and the ratio between the two will supply a means of judging any novel, of whatever kind, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most sensational tale of knight or robber.

[…]

Skill consists in setting the inner life in motion with the smallest possible array of circumstance; for it is this inner life that really excites our interest.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

“The Art of Literature,” Arthur Schopenhauer.

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s “Antiquities of Rome,” mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his “dreams, and which record the scenery of his visions during the delirium of a fever.  Some of them . . . represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome.  Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself; follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it comes to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below.  Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi? — You suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here.  But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of abyss.  Again elevate your eyes, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld; and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours:  and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.  With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in my dreams.

–Thomas deQuincey, “Confession of an English Opium Eater”

“Yes, this is Pandora’s Box. But not any you have seen or heard before. In this one, the snake falls from the virgin’s mouth.”

–transcription from a dream, 2008

The dream reveals the reality, which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life–the terror of art.

–Franz Kafka