Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once

What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it.

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.