One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

How well I would write if I were not here!