The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

If I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word 'doorknob', because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us.

[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.

Art is hard for a puritan to understand.

The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.