Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.