I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.