Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.