Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.