"I'm in no position to hand down any advice," he said, "but there's a rule I follow when I don't know what to do."

"A rule?"

"If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works out. Even if it's hard going at the time."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain."
— Lisa St. Aubin de Terán (The Palace)

"The soul is the form of the body, but not as the shape of a statue is formatio et terminatio materiae, for form does not exist apart from material. There is no whiteness without a white object. But the soul is not a form in this simple sense, and in particular, is not the shape of the material it informs. Therefore, the shape of a being does not affect the being's soul, for then something lower would inform something higher, which is impossible."
— Michael Flynn (Eifelheim)

"Isn't simplification sometimes impoverishment? How to convey the richness of the message with a poverty of symbols. If we oversimplify the form, don't we kill the content?"
— V Y Mudimbe

"There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible."
— Augusto Roa Bastos (I, the Supreme)