There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

If you don't educate people well, then you're going to have a lot of violent, angry young men and women. You can go around saying they're all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

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.

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.