[gruseom]

Saint-Exupéry can't have meant it literally; nothing left to take away means zero. On the other hand, since zero is possible, you can make the same trivial argument against Einstein. I suspect that in both cases the original (con)text would be illuminating.

Edit: actually, it appears that Einstein never said this famous Einstein quote. According to Wikiquote, here is what he did say:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

Hardly as catchy! But it does make explicit the qualifier -- without surrendering adequacy -- that applies equally to Saint-Exupéry as well.

The point seems to be that creation is a process that is first additive, then subtractive. Mere agglutination is inferior.