Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.