I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.

Ah, what a morning this is, awakening me to life's stupidity. [98 - Zenith trans.]

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.