Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.

I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.