I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Love makes the air light.

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.