I would like – say it simply – to write a book which would allow my memories to vanish as they are transcribed and my own name to come apart as it is signed beneath that writing. Conversation with X., much older than me, who says, ‘but no one does anything’. He speaks of the young who have not tried to paint or write or build or make but who have wandered as along corridors without trying any of the doors. Perhaps this is always what is said by the old, but for my own part, reading Nabokov, I wonder whether my past isn’t simply lighter than his, or is it just that Nabokov’s memory is just stronger and more vivid than mine?