It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.