I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Art is hard for a puritan to understand.

What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.