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

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

I am not faithful but I am attached.

I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.