I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.