Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.