Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

We all have the same dreams.