I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.