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.

To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

Life is good, but Wine is better.

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.